Wedding Business Solutions

That time the wedding company wouldn't get on the phone!

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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That time the wedding company wouldn't get on the phone!

Are you meeting your customers where they are, or are you frustrating them with rigid communication methods? In this episode, I share a recent personal experience from my son’s wedding planning drama, and we explore the importance of adapting to your clients' preferred communication channels. How can refusing to get on the phone with eager customers impact your business? What steps can you take to ensure you're not missing out on potential sales because you're not accommodating?

Listen to this new 9-minute episode for key insights on adapting your communication strategies to better meet your customers’ needs and grow your business.

Episode Summary: 

In this episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast, I share a personal story about my son and future daughter-in-law's frustrating experience while planning their wedding. They tried to rent items from a local company but were denied the chance to speak with a representative over the phone. This led me to highlight the importance of meeting customers where they are, whether that means talking over the phone or communicating digitally. I discuss the challenges and missed opportunities businesses face when they fail to adapt to customer preferences. This episode serves as a crucial lesson for wedding professionals on improving customer interactions and sales strategies by accommodating different communication preferences.


If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com 

Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review (thanks, it really does make a difference). If you want to get notifications of new episodes and upcoming workshops and webinars, you can sign up at www.connectWithAlanBerg.com  

View the full transcript on Alan’s site: https://alanberg.com/blog/


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I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

Are you meeting the customers where they are, or are you frustrating them? Listen to this episode. See where I'm going. Hi, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. This is a personal experience that just happened to my son and his fiance in planning their wedding. They were looking for some rental items, and I reached out to my network. Thank you, network. And I got some great referrals for them, referred them to somebody who's in their general area, and they looked at the website, looking at some things, but they are novice consumers.

They don't know what they don't know. They don't know what they need. And there were certain things that the website wasn't so easy for them to be able to find, and they wanted to maybe find out if some of those things were available. So they reached out to the company, they made an inquiry, and they said, this is what we're doing. We need this. They're not having a traditional reception. This is for more like a party type thing. But they're gonna need a dance floor.

They're gonna need some high top cafe rounds. They wanted to see if they had cornhole or some lawn games. And my future daughter in law asked the company, can I speak to someone to talk about what we need? And they told her, no. Now, some of you are just as surprised as I am that when a customer wants to talk to somebody on the phone and then is being told, no, you can't understand why. Now, I'm wondering what it is at that particular company, because I know we all have this experience with online companies or big companies we deal with, and we try to talk to a person these days, and we can't. But this is not a big company. And when I say a big company, this is not Amazon or Microsoft or whatever. This is a local rental company.

That might be a big one, they might be a smaller one, I don't know. But this is a company that somebody was responding to her digitally and told her that there was nobody to get on the phone with. Well, I don't believe that's true. And I wonder if that had bubbled up to the level above that person she's dealing with or if it bubbled up to the owner of the company. If they would have said, no, you can't talk to somebody here. You have to do digital. What they told her to do is go to the website, the catalog is there, come back and tell me what you want, and I'll give you a quote and I'll let you know. What's available.

That is not a good answer when a customer wants to talk to you, especially, which so many of you are frustrated, because I know from our secret shopping that your first response, a lot of you is trying to get that person on the phone on a zoom, or if you're a venue, to come in for a tour or an appointment, and here's somebody who wanted to talk to somebody on the phone and they can't. So where is this dichotomy here? Where is the problem here? Is this just with the one company, or is this a generational thing? Right. It's possible that it's a generational thing. She's dealing with the digital native, and that digital native is like, we're having a conversation here, so what's the problem? Or I don't have the time for that because I have so many other people to work with over here. Again, not the problem of the customer. Customer wants to talk to somebody. They should be able to talk to somebody. But especially in this case, where you have a novice consumer, and I've worked with a lot of rental companies doing sales training.

I've spoken at the American Rental association conferences, and people don't know what they need. And that's exactly the case here. They're renting a venue. The venue happens to have some round tables and farmhouse tables, but since they're not having a traditional sit down menu here, they're having a taco truck and they're having a small music combo. They need a dance floor. They want people to be able to stand and put a drink down and put their tacos down on something. So it's not just a 60 inch round or a farmhouse table. They want to have a different experience.

They want a popcorn machine. They want all these things for experience. And yet the company is saying, just go look at the website and see what you want, where they could be selling them more. And I always say, don't oversell somebody, but people are asking for what they know. They're not asking for what they don't know. So whereas they're going to come back and say, okay, well, so you're going to want those cafe rounds, of course. Do you want linens with that? Well, yes. Well, do you want the linens to go all the way to the ground? Do you want the linens just to drape over the top? It's a different size linen.

They don't know that. I know that, but they don't know that. And what else don't they know? We were talking about dance floors. This is really interesting. We're talking about how big of a dance floor they need. Well, they're trying to figure, well, we have this many people. I say, well, do you expect everybody to be dancing? Right. We're going to have his 85 year old grandmother there.

Do you think grandma is going to be dancing all night? I don't think so. I think she'll dance a little bit. Right. What about everybody else? Do you need a dance floor big enough? So interestingly, I went to five different rental company websites because I did a Google search looking for a dance floor calculator and I got five different answers on how big of a dance floor you need with their guest count. Well, of course, this is now confusing for couples because now they're getting conflicting answers there. So did they need nine by nine or twelve by twelve or 15 by 15 or 15 by 20 or whatever it is? Get all different answers based upon figure that half the people are going to be dancing at a time. Therefore, you need this. Right.

And then other ones were saying that you need one twice that size for the same exact guest count. So why would you not want to get on the phone and talk to that person when so many of you want to get on the phone and here's a customer who wanted to and they didn't want to do it? Well, I think we also have the same thing going on with customers who want to talk to you digitally. You want them to get on the phone, they want to text with you, they want to WhatsApp with you. They want to send you a message through Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or whatever, or through the nod or wedding wire or a site like that, they're going to send you a message. You need to meet them where they want to be. And if that customer wants to talk to you on the phone or wants to meet with you, if that's a thing that would happen with your company, the answer is yes. Maybe it's not this minute or today, but the answer is yes because I said this before I saw it on forbes.com a long time ago. Mika Solomon, the answer is yes.

Now, what's the question? In this case, the answer should have been yes. Even if it wasn't that person, I can't talk to you, but I have somebody who can. And again, all the rental companies that ive worked with, I cant imagine that being the case that anybody would say no. You cant talk to somebody here? Yes. Does it take you more time? Maybe. Might you make a bigger sale? Yes. Is that person maybe not on commission possibly, or maybe not motivated by money. Maybe thats the thing there.

I dont understand why they wouldnt want to do it. And I wonder how many other companies are doing the same thing to your customers? Not necessarily not getting on the phone when they want to, but turn it around again, trying to force them on the phone. Im working with a company right now going to be redoing their email scripts with them because every one of their scripts is about getting somebody on the phone and theyre getting ghosted. A good, what was it? What did we figure out about 40% of the time? Well, if youre getting ghosted 40% of the time, you need to change what youre doing. You dont need the customers to change because they're not going to. It's not their job to change to adapt to you. It's your job to change, to adapt to them. So please, if somebody says to you they want to get on the phone, never tell them no.

And if somebody doesn't want to get on the phone, meet them where they are, because that's how you're going to get their business. Not trying to force them and just because somebody won't get on the phone with you doesn't make them not a good customer. It doesn't make them unqualified. It doesn't mean they can't afford it. There were other things that my son and his fiance did for their wedding. They were able to do complete completely digitally. And it wasn't a matter of budget, it was a matter of time, time zones, all the different things that might affect them not wanting to get on the phone. Like my son, during the week, during the day, he can't talk to you on the phone.

He's on the phone all day long with his work. He's not talking about his wedding. Right. So now it's got to be after hours. So you have to meet people where they are and you have to not create that friction there. But this personal story just hit home and stay tuned for a future episode. I'm going to be talking about. They're going to share all the emails they've gotten from people and all the people that never responded to them or poorly responded or never followed up.

I'm going to give you the personal story of the Berg wedding. Thanks for listening.


I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or you can  text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2024 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com


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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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