Be Your Customer's Hero

CHAPTER 8

Customers Have Mental Rules Too

In Chapter 3, I discussed the concept of our having mental rules—rigid guidelines we create in our own minds about how the world should be and how people should behave. Well, guess what? We’re not the only ones who have them; our customers have mental rules too.

Mental rules are like customer expectations on steroids.

Obviously, the idea of customer expectations isn’t new to customer service training, but the notion of mental rules provides a useful framework for understanding that the word expectations is sometimes not strong enough to represent how customers feel. Occasionally, the customer’s view of what, when, and how something should happen is so strong and so fixed that when we fail to live up to ...