The Red Bench Principle: Making Your Customers Feel they’re at the Center of Your World
As a service provider, there’s a lot of power in creating the impression for your customer that she’s at the absolute center of your world. This is, in a sense, an illusion, because you have (I hope) a life of your own and (I’m hoping again) more than one customer to support. But it is an extremely powerful business-building illusion if you can successfully pull it off.
The Red Bench Principle
Customers are, after all, already at the center of their own world, their own reality. And what they want from you as a service provider is not for you to grab center stage from them, but to reassure them that they, in fact, hold center stage in your world as well.
I know this makes customers sound childish, but I think that’s fine. We’re here to serve customers, not to fix them. In fact, one of my favorite ways of giving myself a reality check about the relationship of a business to its customers is to think about the day, years ago, that my wife and I took our daughter to her first half-day of nursery school. On that fine New England morning, the young, hippie-trippy teacher collected our daughter from us outside the classroom, where we were sitting together on a red park bench. When the teacher returned our daughter to us at noon, my wife and I were again sitting, in the early-autumn warmth, on that same red bench. It wasn’t until a week or three later, as the routine continued, that it became evident that our daughter thought her two parents were sitting on that red bench each day throughout the entire morning, awaiting her return. She didn’t think this in a vague or metaphorical sense. She didn’t kind of half-believe this. She really believed it.
The lesson here is this: For a customer, as with a little kid, they’re not going to be thinking about your other obligations, interests, activities. They’ll think, until you prove them wrong (which would be a mistake) that your world revolves around them, all of the time. And as a service provider you benefit from giving this impression rather than becoming resentful that the customer’s presumptuous enough to be thinking this way. It’s a credit to your business, actually, and to your level of service, if they believe that you’re truly all about them all the time.
(In our daughter’s case, what were we doing in the hours when we weren’t visible to her? Oh, we ate. We did other work, including behind-the-scenes work necessary for her ultimate happiness as our “customer,” as well as work that had nothing to do with her; we even, if there was time, slipped off to the bathroom. But—and here’s what mattered in keeping up the illusion—we were there for her even before she came outside to look for us after school was over, and we were entirely there for her when she did.)
So, I’m going to suggest you throw out the clichéd image of wowing your customers by “rolling out the red carpet” and replace it in your thinking with “sitting on the red bench” as the ultimate in customer care. In other words, what’s most important isn’t to just put on an all-star show for your customers as much as it’s to manage to create and maintain the illusion that you are always there awaiting your customer, attending to her as if you had nothing else on your agenda that could possibly interfere.
Pull this off and you’re well on your way to guaranteeing yourself a customer for life. Because, really: If you make customers feel this way, why would they ever leave you for a competitor? Odds are good they wouldn’t, because they’re already getting what they’re looking for from you.
Images courtesy of Kookkai_nak & m_bartosch at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
