I spend a lot of time in hotels, and after nearly twenty five years of traveling around the world speaking to organizations about customer experience, leadership and culture, I’ve stayed in everything from small independent hotels to some of the biggest and most recognizable hotel brands in the world. After a while, you realize something interesting: most hotel stays aren’t bad. They’re just completely forgettable.
This week, however, I stayed at an upper level hotel belonging to a major national chain. My client was hosting a large event at the property and had booked a significant block of rooms for its customers, many of whom would be in my audience. Based on the brand and the property, I had every reason to expect a very good experience.
It wasn’t.
There was no hot water, which is obviously a pretty significant problem for a hotel. Taking a cold shower might be invigorating when I’m backpacking in the mountains, but it’s considerably less charming when you’re staying at an upscale hotel.
But the lack of hot water wasn’t really what interested me. It was everything surrounding it.
The people at the front desk weren’t rude, incompetent or particularly bad at anything. They were simply average. The restaurant wasn’t terrible, the food wasn’t inedible and the service wasn’t offensive. It, too, was average.
And that’s what struck me. Nothing about the experience made me feel as though anyone was particularly concerned about what the experience felt like from my side of the counter.
Eventually, the hotel put points into my loyalty account as compensation for the inconvenience, but that didn’t happen proactively. It happened only after I called three times.
And there’s another important part of this story: I never complained to my client. Why would I? They had brought me in to speak at their event, I value that relationship, appreciated the opportunity and certainly wasn’t going to burden them with a complaint about my hotel room.
But think about that for a moment. If I didn’t have hot water, there’s a pretty good chance I wasn’t the only one. My client had booked a large block of rooms for its customers, many of whom were attending the same event where I was speaking.
How many of them experienced the same problem? I don’t know. And here’s the more important question: How many of them never told my client?
That’s where this becomes much bigger than a story about a hotel. Organizations make a dangerous assumption when they equate the absence of complaints with the presence of satisfaction.
Silence does not equal satisfaction.
Customers frequently don’t complain. They simply remember. Sometimes they leave, sometimes they don’t return, sometimes they tell someone else, and sometimes, as I did, they simply decide there is no reason to involve another party in the problem.
This is where organizations frequently misunderstand customer experience. The front desk didn’t cause the hot water problem, the restaurant didn’t cause it and the server didn’t cause it. Someone in engineering or maintenance was probably responsible for fixing it.
But here’s the problem: I don’t experience departments. I experience the hotel.
Your customers don’t separate your organization into an organizational chart either. They don’t say, “Sales was excellent, but fulfillment dropped the ball,” or “The customer service representative was pleasant, but accounting created the problem,” or “The salesperson did everything right, but installation was disappointing.”
They simply remember how it felt to do business with you, and every interaction becomes part of that experience.
But in this particular case, there’s another layer. The hotel wasn’t simply serving me. It was also serving my client. My client chose that property, brought its customers there and trusted the hotel with a piece of the experience it was creating for those customers.
That’s something every business should think about. Sometimes you’re not simply delivering an experience for your customer. You’re helping your customer deliver an experience to their customer.
That raises the stakes considerably.
That’s why exceptional customer experience cannot simply be the responsibility of the customer service department. It has to be part of the culture, and when something goes wrong, that’s when the culture becomes visible. Does someone take ownership, show genuine concern, communicate, attempt to make the situation better and make you feel as though your inconvenience actually matters?
Because problems happen. Hot water systems fail, flights get delayed, products arrive late, technology crashes, orders get screwed up and people make mistakes. Customers understand that.
What they remember is what you did next.
Ironically, the hot water problem at this hotel could have created an opportunity for someone to make the experience memorable in a positive way. A sincere apology, genuine concern, proactive communication or someone taking responsibility for helping me rather than simply acknowledging the problem would have changed the experience.
None of those things cost much, but they communicate something incredibly valuable: You matter to us.
Instead, the entire experience simply became another transaction, and that’s dangerous for any brand because your greatest competitor isn’t always the company down the street offering a better product or a lower price.
Sometimes your greatest competitor is indifference.
When the experience is average, customers have no emotional reason to return. There is no story to tell, no loyalty is created and no connection exists. You’re simply another option.
I’ve said for years that customer service and customer experience are not the same thing. Customer service is something you do. Customer experience is how people feel about what you did.
And that experience isn’t created by one department, one employee or one interaction. It’s the cumulative effect of everything.
So perhaps there are three questions every organization should be asking: What are our customers experiencing? What aren’t they telling us? And when something goes wrong, what do we do next?
Because whether they complain or not, they’re going to remember how you made them feel.