Lessons from the Mouse by Dennis Snow

Author:Dennis Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Snow & Associates, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

WHO ELSE IS SPEAKING AND WHAT ARE THEY SAYING?

Regardless of the business or industry, employees send hundreds of messages each time they interact with customers. Even if your business is virtual, your website speaks volumes. In that case, how easy or difficult it is to navigate and get information communicates a lot about your brand and makes a huge impression.

Sometimes these messages are trivial such as a napkin stain or withering flowers in a flower bed. But sometimes they can be significant like an unattended help desk or dangerous potholes in the parking lot. Trivial or significant, every detail says something about the organization’s brand.

Here’s a pretty potent example of the everything speaks philosophy. A friend told me about taking her husband to an out patient facility for minor surgery. While she was sitting in the waiting room, she noticed a beautiful, large aquarium and walked over to take a closer look. Guess what was floating on top of the aquarium? A dead fish. What do you think this detail said to my friend as her husband was undergoing surgery? “They can’t even take care of the fish here!” I know this seems like a ridiculous leap of logic, but I also know that reason sometimes has nothing to do with what goes on in a customer’s mind. What about the tray table that won’t fold down properly on an airplane? “How’s that engine running?” What about the dental office with the rusty water fountain? “How clean is that drill?”

Customers are almost always aware of the everything speaks idea. Whether we think so or not, they notice things. Cheap plastic chairs offered to customers to use as they fill out paperwork for a $500,000 mortgage, filthy restrooms in a posh restaurant, or rickety shopping carts in the grocery store parking lot all tell a powerful story. And examples like these can significantly diminish a company’s brand.

Consider these other examples:

• A pretty pricey hotel I once stayed in had a sign taped on the bathroom mirror that read: “Towels are inventoried every day. Guests will be charged for any missing towels.” What did the sign really say to hotel guests? Most likely something like, “You are probably a thief, so don’t even think about taking our towels.” While the management didn’t mean to send that message that is what was implied. Because everything speaks.

• A colleague spent several thousand dollars to have some legal documents drawn up by a well-known law firm. As she reviewed the documents she saw that everything was in order except three things: her name, her company’s name, and the date. She’d just spent thousands of dollars on what turned out to be boilerplate documents on which the attorney didn’t even bother to fill in the new client’s information. My friend felt cheated, the law firm was embarrassed, and they lost a client forever.

• I was once waiting on my car to be serviced. In the customer waiting area, there was a sign over the coffee machine that read, “We return your car clean.

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