If customer service isn’t number one on your list of priorities, you are gonna lose big. I don’t care what industry you are in—if you put anything else over the experience your customer has while engaging with you, quit now and go find something you really enjoy doing so you can stop making customers miserable. If you don’t love what you are doing, it gets pretty difficult to give great customer service—pull up any recent bad experience with a retail clerk, motor vehicles attendant, cable TV guy—I know you can conjure something up! Now, think about the last really excellent experience you had, especially when someone was helping you deal with a not-so-pleasant situation—perhaps you lost something, needed to change a reservation, needed help.

Good customer service isn’t about being nice only when things are going along swimmingly. It’s more about how you conduct yourself during difficult or stressful situations.

Interesting Fact: If you look around, you can find some recent studies showing that experiences which produce lots of adrenaline also cement those experiences into your memory more firmly than experiences that might have produced less of a chemical reaction.

When I get mad, my adrenaline gets going and, thus, I remember it—for a long, long time. Whereas when I feel happy, I don’t necessarily feel my adrenaline pumping, although my endorphins are definitely assisting my state of happiness. Though it feels good in the moment, its impact isn’t enough to have the same effect on my physical memory. I suspect I would have to be 500% happy to produce the same lasting memory that 80% mad generates.

Why does this matter? Well, you have to work harder at keeping people happy; making people mad is easy. And, for every person you make mad, you create a negative and long lasting memory. Although you’re making people happy, they may forget about it or they may not realize just how great it was to feel happy—or they may be distracted by an angry memory. So, you have to remind them more and more often about how great feeling happy is and you must make sure you don’t ruin all your hard work by making them angry along the way.

This is my motto when it comes to customer service. The only time I stray from it is when I am faced with a customer who is “toxic”, or impossible to make happy. Then it’s clear that we should part ways—hopefully, in the most pleasant manner possible!

This post was inspired by pictures our client shared with us showing their celebration of the launch of their new Website. I would say these pictures helped me create a lasting positive memory of working hard for this client—definitely something worth caring about. And a client who is celebrating this joyously over what we all know can be a long and painful journey is definitely a happy customer.

Recently we launched a site for University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) as part of a collaborative project with Neustadt Creative Marketing. The site and campaign behind it is called College.Be and the site lives here. The success of this project hinges on how the current students use it, but the project was born out of trust. UMBC had to trust its students and trust that they understood what this site was all about. You see, the site is a social media aggregator, meaning once a student creates an account and ties in their social media accounts (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) anything they post to those networks gets pulled into this site. And this site is being used to market UMBC to prospective students. The fact that UMBC liked this idea is a sign of a very healthy university and of great students.

I am often asked by admissions and communications folks working in higher ed, “How many Facebook Fan Pages should we set up? One for admissions? One for transfers? One for prospective athletes?” I always respond with a question, “Well, would you become a fan of something you had no idea about yet?” My point is - I doubt prospective students are scouring Facebook looking for schools they may or may not apply to or attend and becoming fans. I also seriously doubt they are giving as much weight to what an Admissions representative has to say as they are to what current students have to say. Thus creating the case for why the in person visits are so critical, as well as why student tour guides should be carefully selected by schools. Don’t get me wrong, I think Facebook is a great resource for schools to use to keep in touch with alumni and current students. I just don’t see the tremendous value in relying on it to connect with prospects.

I do think that allowing prospects to connect with current students in social networks they are comfortable within is the ideal scenario, assuming the school trusts its students, and assuming these students understand what it is they are being trusted with. I was pleasantly surprised at how excited and positive the UMBC students were when they were told, “This is a site for you guys to use, but it’s also a site we plan on using to market the school to prospective students. We want to ensure that the right kind of kid knows about UMBC and applies because they see what you all are doing.” They totally got it, and not only did they get it, they have embraced it. Personally, I would have loved this idea back when I was in school. I remember flipping through the viewbook every year, hot off the press, and grumbling to myself about bad photo choices or pictures of students who had graduated 4 years ago. With a site like College.Be I could have jumped online and ensured that every kid looking at my school knew all about it from my perspective.

What do you think? This is a hotly debated subject and I welcome all opinions and thoughts! Also - you can read Mark Neustadt’s thoughts on the project on his blog - here.