He aims . . . to please . . .

According to every movie and TV drama I’ve ever seen (and therefore a concrete fact) military snipers live via a morbid but awesome motto: “One shot – one kill.”

What does shooting people from great distances have to do with keeping my customers happy?

I’ll get there, but first let me tell you an almost unrelated story about really bad Chinese food and the crappy waiter who taught me a lesson.

So last Sunday, Amanda and I decided to to spend the day doing what any red-blooded Americans would: sleeping late, eating poorly and shopping. So at around 5:30pm we walk into a nearly deserted P.F. Chang’s for some Chinese food before heading out the mall.

Now I should point out that the mall closes at 7pm on Sundays, so I figured a half hour lunch would leave us plenty of time to shop and at first things seemed like a normal late lunch. We meet out waiter, we get our drinks, we order an appetizer. So far so good.

But that’s where the train left the tracks.

Our lettuce wrap appetizer comes out with only two lettuce leafs, both of which lasted about as long as two gimp zebra on the Serengeti. Then we were left sitting there, twiddling our thumbs and staring around the room. We sat there for over an hour and in that time we saw our waiter three times, had our drinks refilled once (not by our waiter) and were fed fried rice that was dripping oil.

That’s over one hour to get an appetizer we couldn’t eat and split one disgusting entree between two people.

Now this post isn’t here to complain about P.F. Chang’s shitty service – the real point is a valuable one and it’s this:

I was so mad and baffled by the crappy service that I was beyond the point where I wanted to complain. I was so irritated at the totally blown afternoon (we never made it to the mall) that having a manger say “I’m sorry, here’s a coupon” would’ve just pissed me off even more.

There wasn’t anything they could do to make it up to me except give me my hour back and pump my stomach.

So I used the only real power any customer has: I left no tip and I won’t be going back to P.F. Chang’s again.

So take away from my oily fried rice the same lesson you can take away from sniper school:

You have one shot.

We talk a lot about customer service and turning angry customers into happy customers, but  we rarely talk about the times when we don’t even the opportunity to talk to dissatisfied customers.

How many times do you think customers give us a second chance to wow them versus turning their backs and vowing never to buy from us again?

If my crappy lunch experience is any indication, probably a lot.

I could have given the manager at P.F. Chang’s an earful and ranted until they gave me a gift card for a free meal, but I don’t want anything else from them, free or not. So instead of an earful, I said nothing and they lost a customer, probably for life, with no chance to win me back.

You have to get it right the first time because you may not ever get a second chance.

It’s why I’m putting more energy into asking for customer feedback by giving away my products for free to make them better.

It’s why I don’t put a lot of time and effort into “handling” angry customers – because when your effort goes into not having angry customers in the first place, you can spend a lot less time and money on the back end.

It’s why customer experience should be a higher priority than customer service.

So what are you doing for your customers to make sure their experience with you doesn’t need a customer service rep?