The Pink Pen story

I love this ‘Pink Pen’ story that I recently read in an E-Myth Worldwide newsletter. It highlights how important the little things are when it comes to customer service.

This is a story of how a very positive experience fell apart because of one small incongruity in the customer experience. It happened to the writer of the article.

Not too long ago, I decided to try a new upscale restaurant in town. As I pulled up to the restaurant that evening, I saw that the signs for the restaurant were tasteful and informative. The parking lot was spotless and the landscaping was immaculate. Even before I set foot in the door, I knew this was a five-star establishment.

The maître d’ was friendly, polite, and seated me promptly. Though the restaurant was nearly full, it felt like the other members of my party and I were the only ones there. I felt like royalty.

The interior was subtle, upscale, and perfectly lit. I was led to a courtyard that looked as though it belonged in ancient Greece or in a Maxfield Parrish painting. It had been a hot day, but somehow the courtyard was the perfect temperature. As I sat down, I was delightfully surprised; the chair was comfortable to sit in! It was the sort of chair that not only looked nice, it was also the sort of chair I could see myself sitting in for hours, lingering over desserts and coffee, long into the evening.

The white linen tablecloths were crisp and without a hint of fold lines. The staff were dressed in spotless white shirts, black dress slacks, aprons, and were keenly attentive without being overbearing. They were stationed around the periphery, but were never intrusive. I could see a waiter at all times, and I knew that at my least whim, I could summon one over with a look.

The meal was exquisite. The appetiser was sublime, and each course was better than the last. The flavours were expertly combined in unusual ways, and at the end of the meal, I was pleasantly full without feeling stuffed. The desserts were masterpieces of culinary creation.

When the cheque came, it was in a discreet leather case. Though expensive, the meal and the experience seemed well worth the price. But when the receipt came back for me to sign, I took one look and stopped cold.

They had thoughtfully provided me with a pen to sign the check. But there, nestled in the black leather case, was a cheap pink pen with a little fuzzy tassel on the top.

I stared at it. I thought, “This is absurd! This pen doesn’t belong here, of all places.”

But there it was. I held up the cheap, plastic, pink tasselled thing and looked at it. It was a non sequitur. I wondered if they had done it on purpose. Were they so worried about a customer taking a pen that they replaced all their regular pens with pink tasselled ones? Had they run out of nice pens? Was this just an oversight? Out of an incredible dining experience, that pen was the only thing that didn’t fit.

It was a systems failure. And no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I told myself  “it’s just a pen” I couldn’t get the image of the pink pen out of my mind!

It was just one tiny element of a fantastic evening. But it was so incongruous, it was all I could think about. Even now, it’s still the most memorable part of the experience. It’s the only story I tell about my evening there.

The Three Steps

How many ‘pink pens’ are you handing out in your business each day? As a business owner, you need to develop your ‘pink pen radar’. Your customers aren’t stupid; they won’t miss the little things. You can’t afford to either. You need to be on the lookout for inconsistencies in each customer’s experience.

To do that, you’ll need to change the way you think about your business. You need to get out of your head and into your customers’ heads.

Here are three steps to get the process started:

1.  Review your lead generation material through a new lens. What is the promise that you’re communicating to your customers in your message? What expectations will they have when they come to you?

2.  With those expectations in mind, look at your business with a set of fresh eyes – the eyes of your customers. What do they see? Walk through each step of their experience as if you were a new customer – from the initial visit to your website, to the time they leave your store.

3.  Ask yourself: what are the ‘pink pens’ that dilute, distract, or even destroy the experience you intend to create for your customer? Once you’ve determined those inconsistencies, fix them!

Don’t let a small incongruity become the one thing your customers talk about. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And the most important beholder of your business is your customer.

As the article says, no excuse you make can change a bad customer experience. You made a promise to your customers. Maybe you said it. Maybe it was implied. But you made a promise to do something for them. Everything your business does either delivers on your promise, or doesn’t. The customer’s satisfaction stems from their experience of how well you deliver on that promise.

I am sure we all remember instances of being let down by companies where you had high expectations. I recently had a bad experience with having a bed delivered by John Lewis. I have always been impressed by their customer service and quality of their products, so when they lost parts of the bed and we ended up sleeping on a mattress on the floor for several days (as we had disassembled our previous bed on the anticipated date of delivery) we felt particularly let down. Even more so when they finally delivered the remaining parts to find the whole bed had been damaged. Although I still do have better expectations of John Lewis than many other high street companies (they did handle the complaint reasonably well and we did end up with a significant refund), it has left a bad memory.

As a business owner, not only do you have to create positive impressions from the start, you must ensure the customer experience remains outstanding and consistent throughout repeated exposures to your brand.

To read the whole article, go to e-myth. What are your ‘pink pens’? I would be interested to hear.