Ignore Your Customers (and They'll Go Away) by Micah Solomon

Author:Micah Solomon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harpercollins Leadership
Published: 2019-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

GIVING THANKS FOR CUSTOMERS—AND FOR THE CHANCE TO SERVE THEM

If you think Godin works every single day of the year, you’d be wrong. Some days of the year are Thanksgiving.1

“And, as I’m sitting down* at Thanksgiving, I’m able to picture all the people who sit down and eat things that I played a role in. And the idea that I brought some sweetness to their life makes me really happy.”

The Ideal, One-Word Review of Your Customer-Focused “Movie”

The type of experience—movie—you should be working to create will vary depending on the nature of your business. But if you’re looking for a one-word review to summarize what a successful customer experience should feel like, “enchanting” is a good one to aim for. Enchantment comes when you transport a customer from the transactional and mundane to somewhere beyond. Think of how enchantment tends to power success in food and beverage (the restaurant industry), where the best operators have long understood that their jobs involve more than simply feeding guests. Here, enchantment can come in ways as simple as how Five Guys Burgers and Fries charms its customers (the nonallergic ones!) with throwback imagery of peanuts in brown bags. It’s achieved at successful, if a tad kitschy, examples like Darden’s ubiquitous Olive Garden, which strives to make the dining experience feel comfortably, vaguely “Italian” and to provide a destination and experience outside the ordinary for its customer base. And it includes the work of high-end restaurateurs like Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who can create experiences so immersive, so experiential, that a dinner can feel like an adventurous travel vacation to another country.

But enchantment can happen anywhere, even in the most serious of settings, such as the world-renowned Mayo Clinic. Headquartered in Rochester, Minnesota, with locations now across the country, Mayo has become a national and international destination for those with complicated conditions and serious prognoses. Alongside the legendary quality of the medicine, other elements that make the Mayo Clinic experience unique include the lighting (unlike the unnatural fluorescence favored by other hospitals, the lighting in Mayo facilities subtly warms the walls and incorporates outside light sources where possible), and a soundscape that is constructed with an emphasis on privacy and noise mitigation, with the hospital even specifying an extra layer of soundproofing in all of its latest building plans.2

Mayo Clinic makes other unusual choices that are intended to affect the way patients think about their experience there and their diagnoses. In one of these moves, the hospital has chosen to situate its children’s cancer center right in the middle of one of its newer buildings (just off the lobby, in fact) as a statement that the institution isn’t hiding from this oft-dreaded ailment, as it could feel if they were shunting the kids who suffer from it to a wing off a back corridor.

Thinking like this puts the patient—“the needs of the patient,” as Mayo’s motto puts it—at the center of the experience. Through all of the pain, fear, and uncertainty of a serious illness, this comfort and attention can be, in its own way, enchanting.

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