My favorite hotel chain by far is the 4 Seasons.
I absolutely love how they get the little things right. When my private car pulled up to the entrance of the hotel in Las Vegas for Roadshow, the gentleman opening my door said, “Welcome back, Mrs. Robins.”
How did he know that was ME in that car? The management team asked my event team for my arrival time, the car that would be dropping me off and a description.
Upon entering my room, there was a refrigerator stocked with water and seltzer, along with cream for my coffee, a bottle of good red wine and a personalized note thanking me for choosing them for our event.
I love that they have a quality sound machine next to the bed, pristine, crisp linens and a Nespresso machine in the room. I love that when I come back to the room, they’ve put a 4 Seasons mouse pad next to my computer and neatly Velcro-wrapped my power cords and chargers.
Little things that speak volumes.
On this page is an email from a company I’ve discovered and have been buying from – Pasture Brothers. They make the gelatin from grass-fed cows and their candies with organic fruit juice and raw honey. Pretty good stuff. Definitely better than Harbo gummies who produce their candy from radioactive chemicals and diseased cow buttholes (by the way, that’s purely my own personal, uneducated guess).
Anyway, I’ve only ordered a small box, and I’m not a rabid buyer because I don’t eat this kind of thing much. Mostly as a snack to occupy myself on a long flight. But they write personal emails like this AND respond if I write back.
Maybe it’s AI, but I don’t think it’s entirely that. This is such a small thing, yet here I am promoting them to all of you.
People, your customers, are not impressed when you get the core things right because those things are expected. We’re so spoiled that we no longer notice, much less celebrate, that we haven’t been hacked or experienced any downtime for over a year. What we notice is that one of your engineers made a joke they didn’t appreciate or took 10 minutes longer than usual to call back.
By “we” I mean all of us.
Airlines are a logistical wonder. How can Delta have over 4,000 flights daily and safely get thousands of people from point a to point b flying at 35,000 feet in a pressured tube – yet their customers might say, “I’m not going to fly that airline again because I didn’t like the new nut mix they’re handing out.”
The buyer you’re trying to sell to is not impressed by the tech stack that you’ve spent untold hours researching and stress testing to come up with the perfect and most effective solution to delivering robust services at a price point they can afford. They are not impressed by your extremely detailed support playbook that you’ve spent years perfecting.
That’s not to say those things aren’t important. They obviously are. But what your client actually notice and care about are the little things. How you answer your phone. How you close a ticket. How your technician greets your dog when he shows up to the office.
So while you’re putting a HUGE effort into the big things that allow you to deliver exceptional value, don’t overlook the tiny things that truly WOW your clients.
