Can you "wow" every customer, every time, with an over-the-top, amazing service gesture?

Can you "wow" every customer, every time, with an over the top, amazing service gesture that we call wow customer service?

Nah. For one thing, many times a customer doesn't have time to be wowed! They just need their issue addressed or to be handed their receipt. Customers are often in a rush, and it’s important that employees learn to tone down or cut short their efforts to turn every basic interaction into a wow experience, if they’re getting signals from a customer that they’re under time constraints.

It’s also important that employee efforts at wow don’t run afoul of a customer’s desire to stay within their own private bubble, a bubble that an employee shouldn’t even attempt to enter if a customer is glued to a personal communication device, interacting intently with their family or colleagues, trying to get work done, or otherwise occupied or preoccupied in such a way that an extended interaction would be seen as intrusive.

But the idea of wow customer service is this: Human beings tend to remember things that happen in the form of stories that they recall or that they tell themselves. So when it is appropriate, wowing a customer is an approach to customer service that truly has legs. Not only will it transform the story a customer is telling themselves about their experience and your company, it's a story that will likely spread. And spread.

– Micah Solomon, customer service consultant, trainer, author, and speaker

• micah@micahsolomon.com • www.micahsolomon.com • (484) 343-5881