Years ago, I heard a story from a Canadian professional speaker named Donald Cooper that I’ve never forgotten. Donald was an expert in customer service who had built an entire career around noticing the things businesses did that were either exceptionally good or unbelievably stupid. He was also hilarious. He could tell a story about a terrible customer experience that would have an audience laughing hysterically while simultaneously wondering whether their own business was guilty of doing something just as ridiculous.
One of my favorite examples was a store in Calgary that had a giant poster in its front window advertising the Calgary Stampede, a massive annual rodeo and festival held every July. The problem was that Donald spotted the poster still hanging there in December, five months after the event had ended. Here was a retailer heading into the Christmas shopping season, wasting valuable window space advertising an event that had been over for months instead of displaying merchandise that people might actually want to buy. Worse yet, as Donald would put it, the owner must have been “dead from the ass up” to pay so little attention to the store. My guess is that the people working in the store walked past that poster every day and eventually stopped seeing it.
The Things We Stop Seeing
It’s a little like what happens when you invite friends over to your house. Suddenly, you notice the stack of magazines that’s been sitting on the coffee table for eight months, the clutter you’ve been stepping around, and the chair that’s somehow ended up in the middle of the room. You’ve lived with these things for so long that they’ve become invisible. But the minute you start looking at your house through the eyes of someone visiting for the first time, you wonder how you managed to ignore them. Donald had an extraordinary ability to look at a business with those fresh eyes, noticing things that the people who worked there had long since stopped paying attention to.
I was so impressed with Donald’s ideas that I invited him to spend a few days with me in St. Augustine, Florida. It was the middle of winter, so the opportunity to escape the frozen North for some warm sunshine probably didn’t hurt my chances. I paid for his trip, put him up in one of the nicest hotels in the area, and made only one request: we had to share at least one meal every day so I could learn as much as possible from him. I’d heard him speak and owned all his tapes, so I knew he was brilliant and funny. But after our first few meals together, I began to wonder whether I’d invited a curmudgeon to Florida.
Learning to See Through the Customer’s Eyes
Donald noticed absolutely everything. The air conditioner in his room was too loud. He’d asked for lemon with his tea, and it hadn’t arrived. There were little details about the service that weren’t quite right. At first, I thought this guy must spend his entire life looking for things to complain about. But as we spent more time together, I realized I’d completely misunderstood what he was doing. He was just as quick to notice something wonderful as he was to spot something frustrating. He was constantly studying the customer experience, collecting stories and ideas he could share in his speeches or apply to his own businesses.
Pay Attention to What Customers Experience
One of his businesses was a women’s clothing store, and some of the things he did there were absolutely brilliant. He refused to put those annoying security tags on his merchandise because he thought it was ridiculous to inconvenience 99% of honest customers to protect against the small percentage who might steal something. He also eliminated the arbitrary limits on how many items a woman could take into a fitting room. If she wanted to try on 25 outfits, that was perfectly fine with him. Why make someone repeatedly walk back and forth to get more clothes when you could make it easy for her to find something she loved?
He even installed comfortable chairs and a television showing hockey games for the husbands who accompanied their wives. His thinking was that if the husband was enjoying the game, he might actually encourage his wife to keep shopping instead of standing around impatiently asking when they could leave. I thought that was genius. None of these ideas were complicated. Donald simply paid attention to what frustrated customers and did something about it.
Once You See It, You Can’t Unsee It
Spending those few days with Donald changed the way I look at businesses, and sometimes I wish I could turn it off. Now, when I walk into a restaurant, I notice whether the place is clean, whether there’s dust on the shelves, how the tables are set, and whether the service is attentive.
I’ve also developed a particular irritation with expensive restaurants where some creative chef has decided that dinner should be served on a bizarrely shaped plate with silverware that refuses to stay where you put it. I don’t care how artistic the presentation is if I’m spending half the meal trying to keep my food on the plate and my fork from launching itself into my lap. Whenever that happens, I find myself wondering whether anyone in the restaurant has ever actually tried eating off their own plates. Seriously, has the chef ever sat down and attempted to eat an entire meal using the dishes and utensils they’ve chosen for their customers?
Look at Your Business with Fresh Eyes
That’s one of the most valuable things Donald taught me. When you’re running a business, it’s easy to become so familiar with the way things operate that you stop noticing the little frustrations your customers experience every day. You know where everything is, how everything works, and why certain things are done a particular way. Your customers don’t have that advantage. They’re seeing your business from an entirely different perspective, and sometimes the things that seem perfectly normal to you make absolutely no sense to them. The same is true of the things you do exceptionally well. You may have created a wonderful customer experience in one area without fully appreciating how valuable it is or recognizing opportunities to make it even better.
Donald taught me to step back and look at businesses as though I were walking through the door for the very first time. What would impress me? Is there anything that would frustrate me? What would make me want to come back, and what might convince me to take my business somewhere else?
And that brings me back to the store in Calgary and a question I have for you.
What’s the poster in the window of your business?
