Your customers do not remember the average

Ask most owners how the business is going and you get some version of the same answer. Steady. Nothing is going badly wrong. The work is good, the team is solid, complaints are rare.

And yet nobody talks about you. The referrals are polite rather than enthusiastic. Customers come back, but they come back the way people renew an insurance policy, not the way they return to a place they like.

There is a reason for that, and it is not about the quality of your work. It is about how human memory actually operates, which is nothing like the way businesses assume it does.

Two moments do nearly all the work

When people look back on an experience, they do not average it. They remember two things. The most intense moment, good or bad, and how it ended. Almost everything else fades.

The length fades too, which is the strangest part. Researchers have run this many times. In one version, people held a hand in uncomfortably cold water for sixty seconds. In another, they did ninety seconds, the last thirty of which were slightly less cold. The second one contains more total discomfort by any measure. Asked which they would repeat, most people chose the longer one. It ended better, and that is what they remembered.

Now apply that to a business. A customer whose job took three weeks and a customer whose job took five weeks will not remember the difference the way your schedule does. What they will remember is the worst afternoon, the best moment, and the last conversation.

The arithmetic that should worry you

Here is the version that makes the point.

If you asked people to rate a day at a large theme park hour by hour, the average comes out somewhere around six and a half out of ten. There is queuing. It is hot. The food is expensive and mediocre. Then ask the same people to rate the day overall, afterwards, and it comes out around nine.

The gap is not people being irrational. Two moments are carrying the whole day. The ride that was genuinely thrilling, and buying something on the way out while everyone was tired and happy. The hour spent standing in the heat rating a three has quietly dropped out of the record.

So a business with one genuinely memorable moment and a lot of ordinary ones will be remembered better than a business that is consistently pretty good and never peaks. That is an uncomfortable finding if you have spent years making sure nothing goes wrong. Reliability is worth having. It is just not what gets remembered.

The good news is that peaks are cheap

The instinct here is to assume memorable means expensive. It usually does not.

There is a well known hotel in Los Angeles that is, by any objective measure, a converted apartment block. The rooms are unremarkable. It charges well and it is rated near the top of its city by guests. What it has is a handful of deliberately odd moments. A cherry red telephone by the pool that connects to nothing except a person who brings you an ice block on a silver tray, at no charge. Laundry that comes back wrapped in paper and tied with string. A magician at breakfast.

None of that costs much. It is memorable because it is unexpected and because it is in a different category to what the guest was braced for, not because it is lavish.

The same applies in an ordinary business. The thing people tell their friends about is almost never the expensive part of what you do. It is the phone call nobody expected, the problem that got fixed before they noticed it, the small piece of trouble somebody took on their behalf.

Two things to look at this week

Do not attempt to raise the average. It is the most expensive and least noticeable thing you can do.

• Find your ending, and look at it honestly. For a lot of businesses the last thing a customer experiences is an invoice, which means every relationship ends on a request for money. That is a strange note to finish on and it is usually fixable in an afternoon.
• Find your one peak, or admit you do not have one. If you cannot name the moment in your process that a customer would mention unprompted, you do not have a peak. You have a smooth flat line, and a smooth flat line is the easiest thing in the world to forget.

Then pick one and engineer it deliberately. Designed moments are not less genuine for having been designed. The surprise is real to the person receiving it either way.