Learning from the Best Customer Service Cases

Have you noticed that you learn best when you examine the work and results of others? We certainly feel you do. In this article we will examine three great customer cases. All of these offer some excellent points you can apply to your business that will help amplify your marketing.

Related: My Favorite Customer Service Blogs

Case 1

I’ve been with the same dentist for more than 15 years. He’s friendly, personal, and generally on time with his service schedule. I have considerable confidence in his abilities and he had my business loyalty, at least until now.

He does what I expect a dentist to do and he does it explaining all the issues and options without having to play 20 questions with him. For that reason I never thought about considering a change in service providers.

Then one day my wife and I started spending our winters in Florida. And now the option of finding a Florida dentist became a necessity.

The new dentist changed my entire perspective on the service expectations that I had developed over the past 15 years.

This new dentist was younger and surely ‘less experienced’. But it didn’t seem this way. He was much more personal, asked important questions, spent more time with me, and did a more thorough job.

That experience opened my eyes to the quality differences with my current dentist.

I had come to expect quality and service that was very good. But the new dentist provided something even better.

Now every time I am in need of standard dentist action, such as annual checkup, etc., I plan my appointments for our time in Florida. The Florida doctor has won my standard business.

The business lesson here?

If you are any type of service provider, never become complacent. Don’t provide standard, average or just good enough service. Always look for ways to continuously improve your service and do things better.

Because the day someone provides better results, service, or quality than you do, is the day your customers’ loyalty will dry up. Left unchanged and not corrected so too may your business.

Case 2

Ever been to Disney World? With most of our family living 50 miles away, we often felt like tour guides. Not a bad thing though. Lots any business can learn from Disney’s customer experience design and operations. A real difference maker.

Disney puts a tremendous amount of attention to its parks’ customer immersion and customer experience; in fact, one could say the Disney theme park mystique is 100% about immersing the customer in the culture of Disney movies and character history. Over 150,000 employees are employed ‘on stage’ each day at Disney parks to help create this customer experience immersion.

What are the ways Disney uses its park designs and ‘on stage’ employees to create the best possible customer experience?

Consider Disney’s explicit operations and design principles:

Care for customers

In front of nearly every ride was stroller parking and in Magic Kingdom, there were plenty of strollers because nearly every group had some small children. There were areas set aside for stroller parking, and clear instructions for where to park your stroller. Guess what? Customers still managed to ignore them.

In most places, this might create chaos. Not at Disney, where they have a ‘stroller guy’ whose entire job it was to pick up after lazy customers. We have seen them organize strollers into lines, put errant Sippy cups back into cup holders, and keep his little area of the park neat and organized.

All customer facing employees are responsible for ensuring parks remain clean, friendly, organized, and most of all, fun.

Immerse customers in the brand

At Disney, you can’t look in any direction without seeing the Disney branding all around. In the park it works to surround you with the Disney experience at every moment, even when some parts of the park are under construction.

Not to mention the side benefit of Disney likely negotiating some discount on the construction work from businesses in exchange for allowing them to put their brand on the signage seen by millions of park customers.

Lots of help and directions

All stage employees are encouraged to be ‘assertively friendly’. They are to seek out those who look like they need help, before they come looking for help.

The parks at Disney are very large and directions can be confusing. The last thing customers need is to not be able to find what they are looking for. As a result, signs have to be super easy to navigate and offer simple ways to get from one place to another. Disney does a great job keeping their signs easy to understand.

They also have logical layouts for parks and plenty of places to pick up copies of maps as you’re walking around their parks.

Random acts of kindness

Each employee is encouraged to offer random acts of kindness often.

The Fast Pass system at Disney is a work of analytical art that is designed to keep people moving through attractions faster and in a more optimized way. To use it, you just insert your own park ticket and the Fast Pass will give you a specific time to return to a ride in order to board it without a wait.

Only one active at any one time however. At several, you also got the unexpected surprise of a bonus ticket to a nearby (and usually less popular) ride. Thanks to this bonus ticket, you had the chance to ride an extra ride in the same time and feel just a little better about your experience all day.

A random act of kindness that costs nothing.

Be flexible with rules

Many of the rides take photos of you while you are on board. Those photos are sold to riders after the ride, a classic amusement park upselling technique. At Disney, they show you the images and put a person below those images just standing by to answer questions.

Of course, some people will just take a cell phone photo of their image instead of buying one. Many places would put up big signs preventing that. Disney, instead, puts a person there working under the photos to make it a little more socially awkward to take a photo of your photo, but they don’t outlaw it. The result is that they probably still get a high percentage of people buying the photo who really want it. They don’t need to have the typical rule outlawing the inevitable group of people who are happy with lower quality photo they take themselves.

Educating while entertaining

Many places in all the parks Disney provides educational material on signs around the parks. This is particularly true in EPCOT and the Animal Kingdom, and special events like the annual garden show at EPCOT. Can’t be too much of this in our opinion.

Offer reassurance

Everyone ‘on the stage’ has a cast role, and as such, is responsible to contribute to the positive customer experience by being as helpful and assuring as possible.

When we traveled to Australia, we frequently ran into the expression a ‘nervous nelly’ used to represent a timid or always apprehensive person. We all know people like that. They check a map constantly even when they are going the right way, and usually find a reason to worry about something.

Disney does a great job of making sure those people feel at ease, with plenty of places and people to answer questions.

Show ready

Each customer facing employee is expected to be ‘show ready’ whenever they are on stage. Everyone has a part to play as a component of the show. On stage, the show is on and everyone follows costume and customer interface guidelines. Breaks and relaxing are ONLY allowed in areas unavailable to guests.

Disney certainly knows all there is to know about customer immersion and customer experience, don’t they? It’s a culture handed down by Walt himself.

Companies that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty. It is awesome marketing isn’t it.

Case 3

I stayed in a new Marriott Courtyard hotel a while back. The situation was that it was recently opened and should not have been opened until the problems were worked out and management was ready. There were many problems, believe me and it started as a significant customer failure.

But not only did the staff take care of the issues for me, the manager, once he got me back to ‘even’, continued to build the relationship with me. His techniques included exceptional, personalized service, using my name in face-to-face greetings, and continued follow-up and attention to detail. He actually made me believe I was the best customer he had ever had. Not only did I forget about the earlier problems, but I was feeling great about the entire three-day experience.

Service recovery requires remaining with your customer, through follow-up, and through unexpected contact well after the issue. All customers deserve our best service, but the ones that have a negative experience represent an opportunity to define a business.

Such an opportunity represents an opportunity to turn customers into enthusiasts and maybe even advocates. And that requires going beyond the ‘break-even’ point for that customer.

Research has shown time and time again that customers who reported a problem and were delighted with the outcome have higher satisfaction with the business than the ones who never experienced a problem. So these results show the importance of turning customer failure into full customer recovery.

Why should any company not want to seize such a great marketing opportunity?

Try it … the next time you have a customer who has had a back experience with your business. You will be amazed at the results.

Lessons and Examples of Business Change and Work Effectiveness

Let me share several remarkable lessons and examples of business change and work effectiveness.

Here is the first one.

I’ve been with the same hardware store for more than ten years. Their work effectiveness is solid.

They are friendly, personal, and make the time to provide good answers to my questions and provide sound advice.

I have considerable confidence in their advice, especially the ‘old stand-by’s’ from whom I seek out for the tough questions. For that reason, I have never thought about finding a new brand in the hardware business.

Then one day my wife and I started spending our winters in Florida. And now the option of finding a new hardware store brand became a necessity, as my old brand was not within my local area.

The new brand changed my entire perspective on the service expectations that I had developed over the past ten years. Why may you be wondering?

The new brand staff was younger and surely “less experienced.” But it didn’t seem this way. They were much more personal, asked important questions, spent more time with me, and did a more thorough job in getting solutions to my problems from home and yard maintenance.

While I have not yet engaged with the entire service staff for sure, the ones I have dealt with were all of the equal knowledge.

This experience opened my eyes to the quality differences with my current brand service staff in my home in the north.

I had come to expect the quality and service that was very good. But the new brand and their staff provided something even better.

Now every time I am in need of standard home maintenance action, I deal with my expert service staff from my new brand, even if it is by telephone.

When I have some new equipment purchases, I hold off until I can give my new brand in Florida the opportunity. The new brand in Florida has won my standard business.

Did you know that Galileo once said that

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, one of the first things he did was develop a marketing campaign to rebrand the ailing enterprise. Leveraging IBM’s long-running “Think” campaign, Apple urged its customers to “Think Different.” The TV spots began, “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes…”

Yet Jobs’s actual product strategy did exactly the opposite. While other technology companies jammed as many features into their products as they could to impress the techies and the digerati, Jobs focused on making his products so ridiculously easy to use that they were accessible to everyone. Apple became the brand people would buy for their mothers.

The truth is that while people like the idea of being different, real change is always built on common ground. Differentiation builds devotion among adherents, but to bring new people in, you need to make an idea accessible and that means focusing on values that you share with outsiders, rather than those that stir the passions of insiders. That’s how you win.

Great marketers uncover those obvious, but unexpected truths to win consumers’ hearts and sell products.

Examples of business change … here is another example

On December 9th, 1968, a research project funded by the US Department of Defense launched a revolution.

The focus was not a Cold War adversary or even a resource-rich banana republic, but rather to “augment human intellect” and the man driving it was not a general, but a mild-mannered engineer named Douglas Engelbart.

His presentation that day would be so consequential that it is now called The Mother of All Demos. Two of those in attendance, Bob Taylor and Alan Kay would go on to develop Engelbart’s ideas into the Alto, the first truly personal computer.

Later, Steve Jobs would take many elements of the Alto to create the Macintosh.

So who deserves credit? Engelbart for coming up with the idea? Taylor and Kay for engineering solutions around it? Jobs for creating a marketable product that made an impact on the world?

Strong arguments can be made for each, as well as for many others not mentioned here. The truth is that there are many paths to business change.

Examples of business change … here is a final example

In her bestselling book Mindset, psychologist Carol Dweck argues that people who see their skills as a fixed set of strengths and weaknesses tend not to achieve much.

On the flip side, those that see their skills as dynamic and changeable can continually grow their abilities and soar to great heights.

And surprisingly enough, businesses behave in the same way. Most see their business models as a permanent facet of their DNA, so when their environment changes, they fail to adapt.

And that my friends is why 87% of the companies on Fortune’s original list of 500 top firms are no longer there. You heard me right … 87%. Over time, most companies get better and better at things that people want less and less.

Quite a paradox, isn’t it?

Of course, that’s not always true. Firms like Procter & Gamble, General Electric, and IBM still thrive after a century or more.

The reason they endure is that they don’t see their business as fixed, but have continually reinvented themselves and are vastly different enterprises than when they started.

In an age of change and disruption, the only viable strategy is to adapt. Even the best of the best, like these guys, teeter on the edge of disaster occasionally.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. It has been said:

“If you don’t go, where you don’t go; you don’t know, what you don’t know.”

In other words, look for a business change in the places you never look at.

The more I have repeated that bit of insight, the more profound it has become. We are all creatures of habit. So are larger organizations.

Doing things the way we’ve always done them is comfortable, familiar and easy. It’s human nature to choose these “easy ways.”

Do you drive to work the same way every day? Probably! Do you read the same publications—or the same type of publications? Sure!

How about TV and the Internet? Watching the same group of shows or using the same set of websites is also a common habit.

When you do this, what do you get? You get a lot of familiar and comfortable feel.

But true business change often doesn’t make us comfortable. It makes us uncomfortable.

And yet, it is in that discomfort that the new ways, the new ideas, and the new feelings come to light. When you drive to work via a different route, you see different places and sights.

If you go to the newsstand and peruse the magazines that you never otherwise look at, you will see things you simply would never think about otherwise

My business lesson from these examples?

If you are any service and product provider, never become complacent. Don’t provide a standard, average or good enough service. Always look for ways to improve your service and do things better to improve your work effectiveness.

Find staff that is the most caring and keeps themselves well trained on the products you sell.

Because the day someone provides better results, service or qualities than you do … is the day your customer’s loyalty will dry up. Left unchanged and not corrected so too may your business.

Remember, don’t strive to make your presence noticed, make your absence felt. Brands are verbs … what they do matters more than what they say.

Do you have experience with the business change that you can share with this community?

The bottom line

Make your thinking vivid by including what comes naturally to you.

For example, you may not be able to imagine sequences of images very well, but you may excel in imagining other modalities such as smell, touch, and sound. You may be excellent in infusing your visualization with emotional charge and great feelings.

DO not feel compelled to stay within any single modality but make your visualizations and imagination vivid and rich by including numerous modalities.

Your senses are wonderful tools for you to engage while unleashing the power of the imaginative mind. Make it colorful and exciting.

Always make your imagination your ally and your best friend.

**Digital Spark Marketing’s Firestorm Blog**

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.

It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Check out these additional articles on business and its performance from our library:

In this article we will examine three great customer experience case studies. Each of these cases offers some excellent points you can apply to your business that will help amplify your marketing.

Feelings have a critical role in the way customers are influenced.

-David Freemantle

Case 1 My local dentist

I’ve been with the same dentist for more than 15 years. He’s friendly, personal, and generally on time with his service schedule. I have considerable confidence in his abilities and he had my business loyalty, at least until now.

Here is a very good short video on how to build self-confidence.

He does what I expect a dentist to do and he does it explaining all the issues and options without having to play 20 questions with him. For that reason I never thought about considering a change in service providers.

Then one day my wife and I started spending our winters in Florida. And now the option of finding a Florida dentist became a necessity.

The new dentist changed my entire perspective on the service expectations that I had developed over the past 15 years.

This new dentist was younger and surely ‘less experienced’. But it didn’t seem this way. He was much more personal, asked important questions, spent more time with me, and did a more thorough job.

That experience opened my eyes to the quality differences with my current dentist.

I had come to expect quality and service that was very good. But the new dentist provided something even better.

Now every time I am in need of standard dentist action, such as annual checkup, etc., I plan my appointments for our time in Florida. The Florida doctor has won my standard business.

The business lesson here?

If you are any type of service provider, never become complacent. Don’t provide standard, average or just good enough service. Always look for ways to continuously improve your service and do things better.

Because the day someone provides better results, service, or quality than you do, is the day your customers’ loyalty will dry up. Left unchanged and not corrected so too may your business.

Case 2 Disney World

Ever been to Disney World? With most of our family living 50 miles away, we often felt like tour guides. Not a bad thing though. Lots any business can learn from Disney’s customer experience design and operations. A real difference maker.

Disney puts a tremendous amount of attention to its parks’ customer immersion and customer experience; in fact, one could say the Disney theme park mystique is 100% about immersing the customer in the culture of Disney movies and character history. Over 150,000 employees are employed ‘on stage’ each day at Disney parks to help create this customer experience immersion.

What are the ways Disney uses its park designs and ‘on stage’ employees to create the best possible customer experience?

Consider Disney’s explicit operations and design principles:

Care for customers

In front of nearly every ride was stroller parking and in Magic Kingdom, there were plenty of strollers because nearly every group had some small children. There were areas set aside for stroller parking, and clear instructions for where to park your stroller. Guess what? Customers still managed to ignore them.

In most places, this might create chaos. Not at Disney, where they have a ‘stroller guy’ whose entire job it was to pick up after lazy customers. We have seen them organize strollers into lines, put errant Sippy cups back into cup holders, and keep his little area of the park neat and organized.

All customer facing employees are responsible for ensuring parks remain clean, friendly, organized, and most of all, fun.

Immerse customers in the brand

At Disney, you can’t look in any direction without seeing the Disney branding all around. In the park it works to surround you with the Disney experience at every moment, even when some parts of the park are under construction.

Not to mention the side benefit of Disney likely negotiating some discount on the construction work from businesses in exchange for allowing them to put their brand on the signage seen by millions of park customers.

Lots of help and directions

All stage employees are encouraged to be ‘assertively friendly’. They are to seek out those who look like they need help, before they come looking for help.

The parks at Disney are very large and directions can be confusing. The last thing customers need is to not be able to find what they are looking for. As a result, signs have to be super easy to navigate and offer simple ways to get from one place to another. Disney does a great job keeping their signs easy to understand.

They also have logical layouts for parks and plenty of places to pick up copies of maps as you’re walking around their parks.

Random acts of kindness

Each employee is encouraged to offer random acts of kindness often.

The Fast Pass system at Disney is a work of analytical art that is designed to keep people moving through attractions faster and in a more optimized way. To use it, you just insert your own park ticket and the Fast Pass will give you a specific time to return to a ride in order to board it without a wait.

Only one active at any one time however. At several, you also got the unexpected surprise of a bonus ticket to a nearby (and usually less popular) ride. Thanks to this bonus ticket, you had the chance to ride an extra ride in the same time and feel just a little better about your experience all day.

A random act of kindness that costs nothing.

Be flexible with rules

Many of the rides take photos of you while you are on board. Those photos are sold to riders after the ride, a classic amusement park upselling technique. At Disney, they show you the images and put a person below those images just standing by to answer questions.

Of course, some people will just take a cell phone photo of their image instead of buying one. Many places would put up big signs preventing that. Disney, instead, puts a person there working under the photos to make it a little more socially awkward to take a photo of your photo, but they don’t outlaw it.

The result is that they probably still get a high percentage of people buying the photo who really want it. They don’t need to have the typical rule outlawing the inevitable group of people who are happy with lower quality photo they take themselves.

Educating while entertaining

Many places in all the parks Disney provides educational material on signs around the parks. This is particularly true in EPCOT and the Animal Kingdom, and special events like the annual garden show at EPCOT. Can’t be too much of this in our opinion.

Offer reassurance

Everyone ‘on the stage’ has a cast role, and as such, is responsible to contribute to the positive customer experience by being as helpful and assuring as possible.

When we traveled to Australia, we frequently ran into the expression a ‘nervous nelly’ used to represent a timid or always apprehensive person. We all know people like that. They check a map constantly even when they are going the right way, and usually find a reason to worry about something.

Disney does a great job of making sure those people feel at ease, with plenty of places and people to answer questions.

Customer experience case studies … show ready

Each customer facing employee is expected to be ‘show ready’ whenever they are on stage. Everyone has a part to play as a component of the show. On stage, the show is on and everyone follows costume and customer interface guidelines. Breaks and relaxing are ONLY allowed in areas unavailable to guests.

Disney certainly knows all there is to know about customer immersion and customer experience, don’t they? It’s a culture handed down by Walt himself.

Companies that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty. It is awesome marketing isn’t it.

*Customer experience case studies … case 3 Marriott Courtyard***

I stayed in a new Marriott Courtyard hotel a while back. The situation was that it was recently opened and should not have been opened until the problems were worked out and management was ready. There were many problems, believe me and it started as a significant customer failure.

But not only did the staff take care of the issues for me, the manager, once he got me back to ‘even’, continued to build the relationship with me. His techniques included exceptional, personalized service, using my name in face-to-face greetings, and continued follow-up and attention to detail. He actually made me believe I was the best customer he had ever had. Not only did I forget about the earlier problems, but I was feeling great about the entire three-day experience.

Service recovery requires remaining with your customer, through follow-up, and through unexpected contact well after the issue. All customers deserve our best service, but the ones that have a negative experience represent an opportunity to define a business.

Such an opportunity represents an opportunity to turn customers into enthusiasts and maybe even advocates. And that requires going beyond the ‘break-even’ point for that customer.

Research has shown time and time again that customers who reported a problem and were delighted with the outcome have higher satisfaction with the business than the ones who never experienced a problem. So these results show the importance of turning customer failure into full customer recovery.

Why should any company not want to seize such a great marketing opportunity?

Try it … the next time you have a customer who has had a back experience with your business. You will be amazed at the results.

Need some help in building better customer trust from your customer experiences? Creative ideas to help grow your customer relationships?

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Customer Orientation … the Worst Customer Experience Mistakes

Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements

7 Ways to Create a Customer Service Evangelist Business

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.

Let me share several remarkable lessons and examples of business change and work effectiveness.

Here is the first one.

I’ve been with the same hardware store for more than ten years. Their work effectiveness is solid.

They are friendly, personal, and make the time to provide good answers to my questions and provide sound advice.

I have considerable confidence in their advice, especially the ‘old stand-by’s’ from whom I seek out for the tough questions. For that reason, I have never thought about finding a new brand in the hardware business.

Then one day my wife and I started spending our winters in Florida. And now the option of finding a new hardware store brand became a necessity, as my old brand was not within my local area.

The new brand changed my entire perspective on the service expectations that I had developed over the past ten years. Why may you be wondering?

The new brand staff was younger and surely “less experienced.” But it didn’t seem this way. They were much more personal, asked important questions, spent more time with me, and did a more thorough job in getting solutions to my problems from home and yard maintenance.

While I have not yet engaged with the entire service staff for sure, the ones I have dealt with were all of the equal knowledge.

This experience opened my eyes to the quality differences with my current brand service staff in my home in the north.

I had come to expect the quality and service that was very good. But the new brand and their staff provided something even better.

Now every time I am in need of standard home maintenance action, I deal with my expert service staff from my new brand, even if it is by telephone.

When I have some new equipment purchases, I hold off until I can give my new brand in Florida the opportunity. The new brand in Florida has won my standard business.

Did you know that Galileo once said that

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

Great marketers uncover those obvious, but unexpected truths to win consumers’ hearts and sell products.

Examples of business change … here is another example

On December 9th, 1968, a research project funded by the US Department of Defense launched a revolution.

The focus was not a Cold War adversary or even a resource-rich banana republic, but rather to “augment human intellect” and the man driving it was not a general, but a mild-mannered engineer named Douglas Engelbart.

His presentation that day would be so consequential that it is now called The Mother of All Demos. Two of those in attendance, Bob Taylor and Alan Kay would go on to develop Engelbart’s ideas into the Alto, the first truly personal computer.

Later, Steve Jobs would take many elements of the Alto to create the Macintosh.

So who deserves credit? Engelbart for coming up with the idea? Taylor and Kay for engineering solutions around it? Jobs for creating a marketable product that made an impact on the world?

Strong arguments can be made for each, as well as for many others not mentioned here. The truth is that there are many paths to business change.

Examples of business change … here is a final example

In her bestselling book Mindset, psychologist Carol Dweck argues that people who see their skills as a fixed set of strengths and weaknesses tend not to achieve much.

On the flip side, those that see their skills as dynamic and changeable can continually grow their abilities and soar to great heights.

And surprisingly enough, businesses behave in the same way. Most see their business models as a permanent facet of their DNA, so when their environment changes, they fail to adapt.

And that my friends is why 87% of the companies on Fortune’s original list of 500 top firms are no longer there. You heard me right … 87%. Over time, most companies get better and better at things that people want less and less.

Quite a paradox, isn’t it?

Of course, that’s not always true. Firms like Procter & Gamble, General Electric, and IBM still thrive after a century or more.

The reason they endure is that they don’t see their business as fixed, but have continually reinvented themselves and are vastly different enterprises than when they started.

In an age of change and disruption, the only viable strategy is to adapt. Even the best of the best, like these guys, teeter on the edge of disaster occasionally.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. It has been said:

“If you don’t go, where you don’t go; you don’t know, what you don’t know.”

In other words, look for a business change in the places you never look at.

The more I have repeated that bit of insight, the more profound it has become. We are all creatures of habit. So are larger organizations.

Doing things the way we’ve always done them is comfortable, familiar and easy. It’s human nature to choose these “easy ways.”

Do you drive to work the same way every day? Probably! Do you read the same publications—or the same type of publications? Sure!

How about TV and the Internet? Watching the same group of shows or using the same set of websites is also a common habit.

When you do this, what do you get? You get a lot of familiar and comfortable feel.

But true business change often doesn’t make us comfortable. It makes us uncomfortable.

And yet, it is in that discomfort that the new ways, the new ideas, and the new feelings come to light. When you drive to work via a different route, you see different places and sights.

If you go to the newsstand and peruse the magazines that you never otherwise look at, you will see things you simply would never think about otherwise

My business lesson from these examples?

If you are any service and product provider, never become complacent. Don’t provide a standard, average or good enough service. Always look for ways to improve your service and do things better to improve your work effectiveness.

Find staff that is the most caring and keeps themselves well trained on the products you sell.

Because the day someone provides better results, service or qualities than you do … is the day your customer’s loyalty will dry up. Left unchanged and not corrected so too may your business.

Remember, don’t strive to make your presence noticed, make your absence felt. Brands are verbs … what they do matters more than what they say.

Do you have experience with the business change that you can share with this community?

The bottom line

Make your thinking vivid by including what comes naturally to you.

For example, you may not be able to imagine sequences of images very well, but you may excel in imagining other modalities such as smell, touch, and sound. You may be excellent in infusing your visualization with emotional charge and great feelings.

DO not feel compelled to stay within any single modality but make your visualizations and imagination vivid and rich by including numerous modalities.

Your senses are wonderful tools for you to engage while unleashing the power of the imaginative mind. Make it colorful and exciting.

Always make your imagination your ally and your best friend.

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.

It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Check out these additional articles on business and its performance from our library:

The Business Intelligence Process Part 3 Competitive Analysis

Competitive Growth Strategy … the Story of In-N-Out Burger

10 Entrepreneur Lessons You Need to Know

Collaboration and Partnerships Are Key to Business Growth

In this article we will examine three great customer experience case studies. Each of these cases offers some excellent points you can apply to your business that will help amplify your marketing.

Feelings have a critical role in the way customers are influenced.

-David Freemantle

Case 1 My local dentist

I’ve been with the same dentist for more than 15 years. He’s friendly, personal, and generally on time with his service schedule. I have considerable confidence in his abilities and he had my business loyalty, at least until now.

Here is a very good short video on how to build self-confidence.

He does what I expect a dentist to do and he does it explaining all the issues and options without having to play 20 questions with him. For that reason I never thought about considering a change in service providers.

Related post: Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements

Then one day my wife and I started spending our winters in Florida. And now the option of finding a Florida dentist became a necessity.

The new dentist changed my entire perspective on the service expectations that I had developed over the past 15 years.

This new dentist was younger and surely ‘less experienced’. But it didn’t seem this way. He was much more personal, asked important questions, spent more time with me, and did a more thorough job.