Micah Solomon's Blog

What is recognition?

It’s being
seen, literally and figuratively, being acknowledged, being welcomed, and
being appreciated. Giving your customers recognition is essential for nearly
every type retail establishment if you want to provide a great retail customer
experience and customer service, as it is in B2B, hospitality and other service
environments.

When a
customer is arriving on a repeatvisit, they should receive a
special type of recognition: that the customer was missed,that her return fills a gap
that was there in her absence, a heartfelt ‘‘Welcome
back–we’ve missed seeing you lately.” Imagine the personal–and
commercial–difference this can make.

***

“I can’t believe that Amazon knows who I am, and my local
retailer doesn’t,” an obviously-frustrated customer told me when I interviewed
her as part of a customer service initiative for that retailer some time
ago.   [I’ve omitted the type of retailer in order to be
discreet. The lessons here apply to most types of retail business, from
specialty retailing to lodging to foodservice.]

The problem
for this customer wasn’t product selection, or pricing, or the state of the
parking lot. It wasn’t the store lighting or the return policy, or the lack of
a juice bar.

It was
something much more elemental: She felt unrecognized. She felt that this business was
telling her that her presence, her patronage, and, in a sense, her personhood,
didn’t matter.

When she
walked in, she was assaulted by the sound of silence. Or, more accurately, the
sound of employees gabbing amongst themselves, interspersed with the
tap-tap-tapping of texting.

Even with
four or five employees behind the counter and walking the floors, nobody
greeted her when she walked in or as she browsed the shelves. Nobody
acknowledged her, or admitted to recognizing her. Nobody said “hey,” or
“welcome back,” or “nice to see you again.”  This customer, I should
point out, had been to this particular store at least 20 times before by her
own calculation, buying both pricey merchandise and ephemeral knickknacks along
the way.  And, while she didn’t know the employees by name, she knew most
of them by sight. Which would mean, you’d think, that at least half of them
knew her by sight as well.

So what do we have here?  A clean, well-lit (and well-stocked and well-maintained) place for retail, with clean bathrooms, parking out back, and attractive signage in the front. But that’s so not enough.  To think that it is to misunderstand the function of physical retail.

Yes, stores sell stuff. But especially in this era where all variety of stuff can be purchased online quickly, speedily, and in some cases with the chance to evade local taxes thrown in as a guilty bonus, a retail store has to offer an element of humanity, and without this the retail customer experience–the shopping experience–loses a lot of its appeal.

Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash

As a patient experience consultant, here are the five most essential points I bring to my
consulting clients, whether they’re hospitals, outpatient facilities, or other
healthcare environments and practices. Improving patient satisfaction, customer
service and the customer experience, and, of course, HCAHPS scores:  Here are eight key points I find myself
emphasizing frequently (as a consultant and professional keynote speaker) in
hospital and other

1. Great customer service means
systems as well as smiles. When Mayo Clinic
overhauled their scheduling system they employed)industrial engineers using
stopwatches to time wheelchairs between appointment locations in order to
ensure that correct scheduling algorithms were created.

2. Not-for-profit hospitals and institutions in healthcare
can benefit by recognizing and embracing their inherent organizational advantage over for-profit
institutions, as follows: It is easier for the
employees to identify with the aims of an organization that doesn’t have profit
at the center. If you’re not for profit, be aware of this advantage and make
the most of it.

3. Bullying and disrespect lead to
turnover. According to a recent study, working
in an environment characterized by bullying increases turnover intentions of
nurses, and employees report high turnover intentions whether directly bullied
or simply in a work unit with bullying. 
(You didn’t need a study to tell you this, so search out and destroy
bullying before it destroys you.)

4. Every single employee needs to know
how to handle customer complaints and concerns. Even if handling the concern means “I’m finding you
someone right now who can address this” it’s far better than “I can’t
help you, I’m the wrong person.”

5. Much of what’s wrong in patient satisfaction and customer
service is related to poor use of language, and to nonverbal
“language” cues (such as hospital
employees avoiding eye contact with civilians in the hospital, and acting like
they are “other” from us).

6. A blame-free environment leads to
improved transparency, improved systems, and, ultimately, to better results. This has worked to make The Ritz-Carlton a great culture,
and it can do the same for your hospital. Horst Schulze, founder of the
modern-day Ritz-Carlton brand (and now Capella and Solis), frequently says
“If a mistake happens once it may be fault of employee. If it happens
twice, it is most likely the fault of the system.”  So, they get to work fixing the system. So
should you.

7. Strive to deliver service on the schedule of your patient, not just a schedule that happens to be convenient for your
institution. For example: Avoid 
unnecessarily long waits for lab results to be distributed; this
practice is disrespectful and even cruel.

8. You’ll make the most progress on
HCAHPS, and as an institution, by
taking a relatively broad approach to the subject. Being too selectively
focused on the individual HCAHPS questions can actually backfire. A more
effective and powerful goal is to create an organization-wide halo effect that
raises your scores as well as your actual rate of referral — not just the
hypothetical “willingness to recommend.”  (For a longer
piece of mine on HCAHPS and company culture, you may want to spend a minute
with this recent article.)

Micah Solomon is a patient experience speaker and patient
experience consultant and patient centered care consultant, as well as a
patient experience keynote speaker, patient centered care speaker, and
bestselling author. Click here for two free chapters from
Micah’s latest book .

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

Internal customer service
isn’t exactly the same as external customer service, but it’s no less
essential.  As a customer service consultant, I spend my time on
both, and have devised the list below of the different subtleties of execution
involved in internal customer service: internal customer service best
practices/principles for transforming your company culture into one where
internal customer service is a powerful force.

1.
 Respect is expected. With no exceptions. Bullying has to be addressed
immediately, no matter how high up in the organization it occurs.

2. Fine
points of etiquette don’t have to be the same internally as externally (for
example, we can informally answer an internal extension with
“Purchasing–Jim” rather than “XYZ Homewares, Jim speaking, how
may I help you today?”), but the spirit of kindness must prevail.

3. Through
lateral service, we do more for each other, and for the company. By moving
out of our assigned positions to help fellow employees when they are
temporarily short-staffed, we build a stronger company for employees and
external customers.

4.
 Language matters, internally as well as externally, because feelings
matter. “Please” and “Thank you” are not forbidden phrases. Use them often

5.
Expressed and unexpressed wishes are both important.  Example: a fellow
employee makes a specific request, by email.  You can either send them
exactly what they asked for (and nothing more), or you can also, thoughtfully,
include the attachments that they will need to begin working on X, even though
they didn’t explicitly ask for them.

6. As with
external customer service, there are three stages to every service: beginning,
performing the service, and closing the service. If you only do the middle
item (perform the service), you will fail. (Don’t be the tone-deaf manager who
gets all the bills paid, processes payroll and completes the month-end reports
but doesn’t say “good morning” or “have a nice evening.”)

7. People
have a right to grow at work. Be a company that works with its employees to
identify opportunities for their professional learning and advancement.

8. People have a right to be
involved in the design of the work that they do or that affects them. Ask
for the opinions and input of affected employees prior to launching a new
initiative.

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

As a customer service trainer and training designer, I’ve determined
which fundamental principles customer service training needs to convey, whether
the setting is a workshop, half-day or all day training, or via a keynote speaking format. 
Here are the ten top principles that I suggest be part of most every
type of customer service training you engage in.

1.
The employee’s purpose in your organization: the purpose of your new employee’s employment; the
reason they will be asked in the course of their employment to undertake
various functions. This is essential. Without understanding the overall goal of
your company, employees can never give you the full effort of which they are
capable, and they won’t be fully happy as human beings.

For
example, the purpose of employment at Mayo Clinic is to serve the needs of the
patient, which is succinctly spelled out in the healthcare institution’s motto,

“The needs of the patient come first.”

If a newly
arriving Mayo employee understands this mantra, then their daily tasks will be
more meaningful and make more sense to them, and they’ll also begin to
understand when it may make sense to deviate from those tasks in favor of
something unexpected that patient care may call for.

Even more
succinctly, Lincoln Military Housing states its purpose as

“Every Mission Starts at Home.”

In just five words, this purpose, once it’s
conveyed to arriving employees, has the power to breathe life into the details
of what could otherwise feel like a checklist-driven day.  Employees
aren’t just workers going about their jobs; they are part of the
nation’s readiness mission.

2. The importance of 100%
customer retention, of never losing a customer. Every individual
customer is irreplaceable; once they’re gone, they leave a hole in our
company’s future, although, if an employee hears Marketing yammer on about
market share, they may get a different impression. The #1 directive that every
customer-facing employee needs to learn is to succeed with every customer–and
to call in reinforcements if the relationship seems, at any point, to be going
south.

3. The power of serving
even unexpressed needs and wishes, desires that a customer may not have voiced
for a variety of reasons. This principle, which I call anticipatory customer
service, is a key opportunity for an employee to elevate the customer
experience for the benefit of the customer, who may not have expressed what
they’re actually in need of, due to shyness, a fear of being a bother, or a
lack of understanding of your offerings.  Going beyond serving
what has been asked for to serving what the customer is truly looking
for is one of the quickest and most effective ways to convince a customer that
your company is their company.

4. The importance of
using your empowerment in the organization to creatively assist
customers.  Speaking to a new employee, let them know they’ve been
hired for more than their labor. Customers, and your company, will only get the
most out of an employee’s presence at the company if that employee knows to
rise to the occasion in creative ways that nobody sitting “backstage” in an
office or boardroom could really conceive of. As legendary hotelier Herve
Humler puts it,

“Empowerment isn’t an add-on; it’s your job to be empowered.”

5. The importance of
timeliness: A good job done late is defective. Furthermore, it’s the
customer who defines “late,” based on their expectations for your industry and
from what you have led them to believe.

6. Language essentials,
because how you say (or write) something is as important
as what you say. 

 Every new employee
needs to be trained on a variety of issues relating to language: 

 • Words and
phrases to avoid, and words and phrases to use in their place:

There are many words and
phrases that are likely to make a customer uncomfortable or to get their
hackles up.  In a complete customer service consulting initiative, I will
work with a client to create a “language lexicon” spelling these out. Even if
you don’t go to this extent, be sure to give new employees some guidance in
this area.

Here are just two
examples:

Avoid:

“You owe $_______,”

when letting someone know
what their bill is (because it sounds accusatory).

Instead, say it more
gently, along the lines of:

“Our records are showing a balance of $_____.”

Avoid:

“Just one?”

when seating someone in a
restaurant (because it sounds like you think they’re a friendless loser).

Instead, say,

“Will anyone be joining you?”

(Or, better, I’d argue,
just proceed to seat them. If they do have a friend coming, they’ll let you know.)

Avoid responding with

“No problem”

when a customer thanks
you for your efforts on their behalf.

Instead, try one of the
following responses:

“You’re welcome.”

“Thank YOU.”

“I’m happy I could help.”

“My pleasure.”

• Principles of language
use, including

Making sure to use a customer’s name (within reason).“Always having the last word” in a conversation with a customer,
whether on the phone or in person (Customer says, “thank you”; you say, “you’re
welcome,” they add on a “Have a great day”; you respond to that one as well.
And so forth.

7. How to perform service
recovery: how to work with an upset customer, a customer who feels
wronged. If your organization doesn’t already have a system in place for
this, I suggest you train them on my AWARE sequence (Acknowledge, Widen, Agree,
Resolve, Evaluate). To get you started, here’s an article about service
recovery and the AWARE method.

8. The importance of
matching a customer’s style and pacing 

Customers have different
styles – some are “all business,” some are leisurely, some are high-energy and
some are in a terrific hurry. To make this more complicated, behavior can
change from day to day and even from morning to afternoon. To give great
service requires you to adjust your customer service style and pacing to match
this, which you can only do if your antennae are constantly up for the clues
that let you know how a customer is oriented and what they are expecting.

9. The importance of warm
welcomes and fond farewells:

As humans, we have a
tendency to remember the beginning and ending of events So if an organization
can nail the very first and very last moments of its time with
a customer, it can disproportionately improve the overall impression
that a customer is left with of the encounter.

A few simple pointers
here on making sure this happens:

To provide a warm welcome
on phone, be ready to take the call before picking up; smile when you
answer, and use a greeting that includes the following four elements:

Your nameA company identificationThanks for callingAn offer of assistance

(One example of this
would be: “Thank you for calling Four Aces Inc., this is Micah; how may I help
you today?,” but there are various other types of phrasing that can cover these
four points equally well.)

A fond farewell, either
on the telephone or in person, should include a goodbye, thanks, and, if
appropriate, an invitation to return or a statement that you’re looking forward
to the customer’s return visit.

(One example of this
would be: “Thanks for coming in today, I hope the rest of your week is
wonderful; we’re looking forward to seeing you again [or, even better, “we’re
looking forward to seeing you when you come back in July.”])10.
The concept that every customer resides within their own protective bubble, and
you only enter that bubble with their permission. Here’s an article that covers the concept of
the customer’s protective bubble and my BUBL method for addressing this correctly.

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

Photo by Taylor Grote on Unsplash

I hear (and witness) some phenomenal customer service and
hospitality stories as a customer service and hospitality consultant, author, and keynote
speaker.

Still, of all those great customer service stories, this one
story, above nearly any other, blew my mind.  
It’s a story of a small but intentional act of heroic customer service
and proactive hospitality. And it’s particularly lovely that it comes from a
modest, extended-stay property: the Hyatt House in Herndon, Virginia.

A dog walks into a hotel lobby

Put yourself in this scene. You’re walking by the front desk
at the Hyatt House (an economically priced, extended-stay hotel brand that Hyatt carved out recently from its AmeriSuites acquisition).

Out of nowhere, a dog bounds up to the hotel’s front desk,
wagging his tail. You watch the desk agent lean over and toss a rolled
newspaper into the dog’s mouth. The dog then walks away down the hall and the
desk agent goes back to work processing paperwork for the next guest in front
of him.

A colleague and a collie

Let’s let Sara Kearney, Hyatt’s Senior Vice President for Brands tell us what in the world was going on. “Turns out, Mrs. So and so [the dog’s owner] had just sold her house after 40 years and–like many of our guests at Hyatt House–is in a sort of limbo before moving into her first empty-nester. So my colleague at the front desk ( at this point in the interview I had to confirm that she said “colleague,” not “collie” ) was trying to help her maintain her routine.

The dog jogs on over from her hotel room to the front desk,
gets the newspaper just like he did when he lived in the house and takes it to
her every morning. Vladimir, the front desk agent in question, always saves
that paper for the dog before handing out the rest of the papers to the other
guests. ”

****

An extended-stay
brand like Hyatt House is especially important in terms of the power of
positive service. Why? Because somebody who is in an extended-stay situation is
likely to be a bit out of sorts. The recently divorced. People on long job
assignments away from their families. People whose houses have sold and their
new home isn’t ready yet. This is a situation where the psychological realities
of a customer’s life can be weighing heavily on their perception of the goods
and services you are providing.  And where
service—hospitality– like this can shine.

[Originally published in Forbes.com. The author, Micah Solomon, is an author, consultant, influencer, keynote speaker, and trainer in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, and hospitality. (Here are three ways to reach Micah: email, chat, web).

Customer service transformation isn’t easy, but it’s one of the most effective ways to improve business performance. If you’re looking for a place to start, here are seven service catalysts that can bring powerful results.

1. Empower your frontline employees. It’s not possible for even the most tightly-drafted standards, best practices, and scripts to cover every possible customer scenario, so the only way to ensure superior customer service is through embracing employee empowerment: giving every customer-facing employee the power to do what’s needed to solve the often-unpredictable issues and challenges that come up for and with customers.

2. Stress purpose over function. The concept of purpose-driven thinking (and action) is essential, and closely tied into Point #1. Once your employees are empowered to do what’s best, they need to understand how your company defines “best.” And that definition cannot be based on a specific job description or checklist or daily to-do list; it needs to be based on the purpose of the organization. This way, the empowered actions taken by the employee (and the impetus to take empowered action in the first place) will be consonant with what the company is striving to do.

This is sounding pretty abstract, so let me make it concrete. Consider how Mayo Clinic, one of the world’s great healthcare organizations, defines its organizational purpose (in part) in the elegant behavioral imperative, “The Needs of the Patient Come First.” So an employee in Housekeeping, who is generally charged, of course, with making beds and cleaning up, is empowered to switch gears and assist a patient or a patient’s family in distress as need be—not, of course, by re-doing the surgery, but by getting them to someone who can help explain their treatment or answer their other concerns.

3. Review and revamp your hiring practices. Nothing on this list is more important than how you choose employees for customer-facing customer service work. It’s very challenging to provide great customer service when the employees charged with providing that service are poorly suited to the task. While much can be accomplished to fine tune the performance of most any employee, it’s a huge organizational advantage to start with employees who have a natural affinity for people and service. The way to accomplish this is through improving how you approach hiring (or “selection,” which is a better term for the process). (You’ll find more of my thoughts on employee selection [hiring] here.)

4. Improve your overall talent management. There’s much more to the HR side of great customer service than hiring. You also need to develop and nurture employees—talent, something that needs to be systematically done to develop and sustain a great customer-focused organization. If you don’t, no matter how great the employees you start out with are, their enthusiasm and growth will ultimately wither and die. (More from me on talent management here.)

5. Modernize your customer support response timetables. I have the honor to work with many great customer-focused organizations (as a customer service consultant), and elevated though most of the standards in such companies are, I will occasionally come across this particular issue as a blind spot. If you still have 1995-era response commitments, such as “We strive to answer all customer emails within 24 hours,” you’re not doing business in a way that is suitable for customer expectations in 2018. 24 hours, in internet time, is equivalent to 20 years; by the time that 21st or 22nd hour rolls around, customers are pretty sure they’re never going to hear from you.

6. Double down on customer service training.Perfectly-hired employees only bring great aptitude for customer service, but customer service training can turn that potential into reality, if done right. (Here are some of my thoughts on what it means to “do customer service training right.”)

7. Introduce a daily “customer service minute.” The greatest complement to a program of customer service training is a simple, homegrown ritual: a daily “customer service minute,” as I call it. It’s actually 5-10 minutes (but not as long as 15); during this time you’ll discuss one principle of customer service. Have a different employee lead it every day, so it doesn’t become burdensome to management and therefore eventually fall by the wayside.

Micah Solomon is an author, consultant, influencer, thought leader, keynote speaker, trainer, and subject matter expert (SME) in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, hospitality, innovation. (email, chat, web).

[Originally published in Forbes.com. The author, Micah Solomon, is an author, consultant, influencer, keynote speaker, and trainer in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, and hospitality. (Here are three ways to reach Micah: email, chat, web).

You’d hardly know it, with the reflexive hand-wringing that many businesses engage in today, but customers want to be loyal. They want something to hold onto–and if you play your cards right, that something could be you.

There are two challenges in making this inclination toward loyalty work out, however.

First off: A customer’s inclination to be loyal isn’t sufficient to overcome poor customer service, at least not repeatedlypoor customer service, though loyal customers are likely to cut you slack once or twice, or a spectacularly mis-designed customer experience. And it’s not sufficient to outweigh excessive inconvenience or an overly-large price differential. (Richard Branson once addressed this reality in a hilarious way: When British Airways offered a cutthroat discount on trans-Atlantic flights, Branson ran full-page advertising to the effect that Virgin always has the best interests of its customers in mind, and therefore would encourage them to take advantage of this ridiculously-cheap offer, even though it was with an enemy airline.) The customer inclination toward loyalty tends to be just strong enough, rather, to tilt a customer toward a pattern of repeat business if all things are approximately equal.

But this difficulty isn’t too terrible, is it? All any business can ask for is a fair shake in the marketplace, and by at least trying to be loyal, customers are giving your business precisely this fair shake. It’s on you to make sure that your prices are reasonable, your customer service is empathetic and efficient, and your customer experience is well-designed, convenient, and keeps the customer in mind at all times. And all of this, frankly, isn’t too much to ask.

The second problem is different, both more serious and more easily overcome. It’s that companies themselves fail to be loyal. They fail to recognize this powerful force–their customers’ desire to be loyal, to embrace it and demonstrate their own corporate loyalty in return. This can happen because of mis-designed sales incentives with their emphasis on bringing in new customers rather than tending to the old. It can occur due to a lazy mindset of taking customers for granted, of assuming and taking advantage of their loyalty. It can also come about due to the opposite of taking customers for granted, of assuming the worst of existing customers–that they’re unlikely to turn out to be loyal–and turning that assumption, through customer neglect, into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A customer’s desire to be loyal has limitations. It has impurities. But it is still a powerful force, waiting for your company to embrace it. Once you do, you’re going to be able to watch the results flow–quickly and sustainably–to your bottom line.

Micah Solomon is an author, consultant, influencer, thought leader, keynote speaker, trainer, and subject matter expert (SME) in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, hospitality, innovation. (email, chat, web).

[Originally published in Forbes.com. The author, Micah Solomon, is an author, consultant, influencer, keynote speaker, and trainer in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, and hospitality. (Here are three ways to reach Micah: email, chat, web).

For a business to succeed, it needs to maximize the payoff from its customer experience. This payoff comes when customers remember their experience positively and choose to return, ideally bringing their online and offline friends with them as well.

This makes it essential to understand how customer memory actually works. So, let’s look at what the scientific disciplines of social psychology and behavioral economics have to say on the subject, as viewed through my lens as a customer experience designer and customer service consultant.

A central principle is that what’s retained in memory is incomplete and non-continuous. Memory is a collection of moments, undemocratically assembled, with enormous gaps in it. In fact, a customer’s memory of the customer experience is, in a sense, one big gap, punctuated by a couple of “snapshots”–or, if you prefer, a couple of extremely brief “movies”–that define the entire customer experience for that customer.

[A caution: “snapshot” and “movie” are both visual terms, which makes them not fully accurate. The impressions retained by a customer can depend as much on olfactory, auditory, and physical (touch) elements as they do on visuals.]

Since only a very few moments linger in memory, serving as proxy for the entire experience, you’ll of course want to know which moments persist in memory. The answer, I’m a bit afraid to tell you, is that it’s not entirely predictable. But there are definitely factors that make the odds better that something will be retained in memory.

• The beginning of the customer experience is disproportionately memorable; this is the well-established “primacy effect.” (Sometimes, depending on the nature of your business, the beginning of an interaction within the customer experience can also have disproportionate memorability due to its location in time.) Furthermore, connecting with customers in those first moments has practical importance because if you fail at this juncture, a customer is likely to tune out, turn off, or jump ship before you have a chance to proceed further.

• The end of the entire customer experience has similar potential to be memorable; this is known as the “recency effect.”

• “Peak moments” (positive peaks and negative peaks), no matter where they occur, are also highly memorable. That might sound like a silly statement (why wouldn’t peaks be memorable?) but the point is how disproportionate this effect tends to be. It’s quite possible for a single peak moment to matter more than all of the non-peak moments in a customer experience combined. (The disproportionate memorability of these figurative peaks is more or less akin to literal, physical peaks. Think of how memorable it is to reach a mountain peak compared to the longer stretches of time spent nearly at the peak, halfway up the mountain, and so forth.)

This makes it spectacularly important to pay attention to whatever could form a powerful emotional moment in a customer journey; it’s why “wow moments” can be so valuable in forming a bond with a customer and why great customer service-oriented organizations strive to distinguish themselves not only by consistently providing satisfactory customer service, but also by intermittently providing extraordinary customer service moments—wow customer experiences, in other words. (More from me on wow customer service here, some examples here, and some words about the potential pitfalls of “wow” here.)

• A corollary of the peak moment principle is that overall duration of an experience doesn’t necessarily matter particularly much. It’s possible for a customer to take home vivid, warm memories from a mere 25 seconds of spectacular sparkling kindness, yet retain no memories at all from a week of perfectly satisfactory service interactions with the same company. (This “time-deafness” is why it’s a mistake for resort or hotel employees to ask, during the course of a guest’s stay, “how long will you be with us?” This takes the guest out of the moment and projects them mentally past the end of their vacation.)

By the way, don’t mis-apply this time-deafness principle and think it means that speed of service doesn’t matter. Speed of service matters greatly, as I discuss here in my article on the cliff of dissatisfaction. No company benefits from a customer taking home memories of waiting in line or on hold or while a phone rings five, six, seven times and then rolls over to a hold-music serenade.

****

Before I leave you, I want to add a final caveat. Though I’ve given you some insight into what’s likely to be retained in customer memory, applying this in a mechanical or reductive manner isn’t going to work. Businesses have only limited ability, on their own, to “game” how a moment is perceived by a customer. A business creates its own end of the customer experience, but a customer then brings their humanity to the experience; it’s this combination of the customer’s personality and what the business delivers that creates the experience as ultimately perceived by the customer.

This reality should inspire you to stay as close to the customer as possible, ideally to individual customers, and it should also­­–and this is very important­–keep you humble about the entire enterprise.

Micah Solomon is an author, consultant, influencer, thought leader, keynote speaker, trainer, and subject matter expert (SME) in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, hospitality, innovation. (email, chat, web).

The post How To Create A Customer Experience That Lingers In A Customer's Memory appeared first on Micah Solomon: customer service speaker, customer service keynote speaker, author, customer experience consultant, Forbes contributor, influencer and thought leader..

[Originally published in Forbes.com. The author, Micah Solomon, is an author, consultant, influencer, keynote speaker, and trainer in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, and hospitality. (Here are three ways to reach Micah: email, chat, web).

For a business to succeed, it needs to maximize the payoff from its customer experience. This payoff comes when customers remember their experience positively and choose to return, ideally bringing their online and offline friends with them as well.

This makes it essential to understand how customer memory actually works. So, let’s look at what the scientific disciplines of social psychology and behavioral economics have to say on the subject, as viewed through my lens as a customer experience designer and customer service consultant.

A central principle is that what’s retained in memory is incomplete and non-continuous. Memory is a collection of moments, undemocratically assembled, with enormous gaps in it. In fact, a customer’s memory of the customer experience is, in a sense, one big gap, punctuated by a couple of “snapshots”–or, if you prefer, a couple of extremely brief “movies”–that define the entire customer experience for that customer.

[A caution: “snapshot” and “movie” are both visual terms, which makes them not fully accurate. The impressions retained by a customer can depend as much on olfactory, auditory, and physical (touch) elements as they do on visuals.]

Since only a very few moments linger in memory, serving as proxy for the entire experience, you’ll of course want to know which moments persist in memory. The answer, I’m a bit afraid to tell you, is that it’s not entirely predictable. But there are definitely factors that make the odds better that something will be retained in memory.

• The beginning of the customer experience is disproportionately memorable; this is the well-established “primacy effect.” (Sometimes, depending on the nature of your business, the beginning of an interaction within the customer experience can also have disproportionate memorability due to its location in time.) Furthermore, connecting with customers in those first moments has practical importance because if you fail at this juncture, a customer is likely to tune out, turn off, or jump ship before you have a chance to proceed further.

• The end of the entire customer experience has similar potential to be memorable; this is known as the “recency effect.”

• “Peak moments” (positive peaks and negative peaks), no matter where they occur, are also highly memorable. That might sound like a silly statement (why wouldn’t peaks be memorable?) but the point is how disproportionate this effect tends to be. It’s quite possible for a single peak moment to matter more than all of the non-peak moments in a customer experience combined. (The disproportionate memorability of these figurative peaks is more or less akin to literal, physical peaks. Think of how memorable it is to reach a mountain peak compared to the longer stretches of time spent nearly at the peak, halfway up the mountain, and so forth.)

This makes it spectacularly important to pay attention to whatever could form a powerful emotional moment in a customer journey; it’s why “wow moments” can be so valuable in forming a bond with a customer and why great customer service-oriented organizations strive to distinguish themselves not only by consistently providing satisfactory customer service, but also by intermittently providing extraordinary customer service moments—wow customer experiences, in other words. (More from me on wow customer service here, some examples here, and some words about the potential pitfalls of “wow” here.)

• A corollary of the peak moment principle is that overall duration of an experience doesn’t necessarily matter particularly much. It’s possible for a customer to take home vivid, warm memories from a mere 25 seconds of spectacular sparkling kindness, yet retain no memories at all from a week of perfectly satisfactory service interactions with the same company. (This “time-deafness” is why it’s a mistake for resort or hotel employees to ask, during the course of a guest’s stay, “how long will you be with us?” This takes the guest out of the moment and projects them mentally past the end of their vacation.)

By the way, don’t mis-apply this time-deafness principle and think it means that speed of service doesn’t matter. Speed of service matters greatly, as I discuss here in my article on the cliff of dissatisfaction. No company benefits from a customer taking home memories of waiting in line or on hold or while a phone rings five, six, seven times and then rolls over to a hold-music serenade.

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Before I leave you, I want to add a final caveat. Though I’ve given you some insight into what’s likely to be retained in customer memory, applying this in a mechanical or reductive manner isn’t going to work. Businesses have only limited ability, on their own, to “game” how a moment is perceived by a customer. A business creates its own end of the customer experience, but a customer then brings their humanity to the experience; it’s this combination of the customer’s personality and what the business delivers that creates the experience as ultimately perceived by the customer.

This reality should inspire you to stay as close to the customer as possible, ideally to individual customers, and it should also­­–and this is very important­–keep you humble about the entire enterprise.

Micah Solomon is an author, consultant, influencer, thought leader, keynote speaker, trainer, and subject matter expert (SME) in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, hospitality, innovation. (email, chat, web).

[Originally published in Forbes.com. The author, Micah Solomon, is an author, consultant, influencer, keynote speaker, and trainer in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, and hospitality. (Here are three ways to reach Micah: email, chat, web).

If you want a leg up in providing superior customer service and a chance to bolster employee engagement along the way, then it’s time to expand your viewpoint beyond individual customer interactions to the bigger picture of culture–specifically what I call “customer service culture.”

Building and nurturing your customer service culture should be the foundation that supports and sustains superior customer service. It’s the bedrock upon which a properly designed and focused customer experience should rest.

What follows is a selection of what I call “customer service culture catalysts” to help get you on your way to creating and maintaining your customer service culture. (If you would like a version of this list, formatted for printing or intra-office distribution, let me know and I’ll fix you up.)

1. A well-worded mission statement, short enough to be memorable but long enough to be meaningful. What you want here is something written in understandable English that can be memorized and internalized by all employees to help them grasp the essence of what your company is, or strives to be.

2. A longer but still-brief and carefully worded philosophical framework–I suggest it contain more than 9-12 items. You will also want to create a condensed version of this that’s small enough to be formatted on a laminated accordion card for each employee’s reference. (PS: Don’t condense by eliminating principles; condense by shortening the descriptions.)

3. Explicitly stated and frequently demonstrated support for empowerment. Empowerment should be supported in your foundational documents. It should be reiterated in your training. It should be reinforced every day by people in leadership positions, who should be praising employees for exercising initiative rather than busting chops when empowerment goes wrong.

It’s easy to say, in a vague sort of way, that “employees are empowered to provide superior service.” But to take empowerment beyond lip service, you need to make it clear that judgment calls, even those that prove to be expensive, are the prerogative of every employee (after a training period, of course). And you need to bring this to life through management and leadership that is religious about praising employees for exercising their empowerment even when it doesn’t go perfectly. Make clear that it is okay to make what seemed like the right call at the time even if the results don’t prove to be exactly what you were hoping for.

4. An employee selection (hiring) approach that stresses personality traits rather than prior experience. Different prospective employees will have different aptitudes for service, and if you want your culture to have the best chance of taking root and flourishing, employee selection is an essential place to start. (Here’s some of my writing on how to recruit and hire employees for customer-facing positions.)

5. Involving the CEO or senior leadership in onboarding new employees. This is a non-negotiable. If you don’t make it clear that you value employees’ service right when they join your company, and you don’t take this important early time to stress what is important in your organization, your culture is doomed to emerge haphazardly rather than take the form that you hope for.

6. A daily “customer service minute” (or lineup, or huddle—it doesn’t matter what you call it) ritual. Start every day–or every shift, if you have more than one–discussing a single principle of customer service excellence. By having a different employee leading your huddle every day, this ritual becomes a multi-pronged catalyst of culture: It directly provides learning to all who attend. It develops leadership skills among the employees who lead it. It fosters togetherness and team spirit among the attendees. And, if you make a point of backing up customer service principles with examples of superior service as provided previously within your company, it provides an opportunity to recognize employees for the great service they’ve provided.

7. Managing from the floor. Managers who hide in their offices miss their chance to lend their much-needed support to a budding service culture.

8. In-depth customer service training. Maybe this doesn’t seem like a cultural item (and maybe it seems self-serving, since I offer customer service training myself) but the principle is inescapable: In-depth customer service training is essential. Having the best-intentioned, most carefully selected employees simply isn’t enough if they don’t receive the training they need to do their best.

9. An ethos of lateral service. This means an expectation that there’s no such thing in the organization as “not my job.” It’s demonstrated when everyone, including senior staff, pitches in to get things done in crunch time (like Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who famously mans the phones during the holiday rush). (You may enjoy my customer service-focused interview with Tony, which you can find here.)

10. An “all-hands” approach to solving customer service problems once and for all: Encouraging involvement from all departments after a customer service mishap occurs, to identify what led to the problem and find ways to prevent it in the future. Obviously, this has direct value in improving results, but it has cultural value as well by demonstrating what is valued within your organization.

11. An active internal communication channel to serve as a social media grapevine to promote and assess engagement. Without involvement there is no commitment.

Credit where credit’s due: Thanks to customer service blogger Bill Quiseng (whom you should follow at @billquiseng) for his contributions to this list.

Micah Solomon is an author, consultant, influencer, thought leader, keynote speaker, trainer, and subject matter expert (SME) in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, hospitality, innovation. (email, chat, web).