When the customer walks through the door, we have to understand and manage their perceptions.
Frank, former Manager and Mentor

In my family, upon graduating from high school, you had one month to get yourself together and move out. Luckily, I had worked during my senior year of high school so I had saved enough money for a down payment on a car. I had also caught the attention of the management team. When they approached me with the opportunity to go into management training, it seemed like a good next step.

I was relocated to Dodge City, Kansas, which was like a different world to me. The best thing about Dodge was the management team I was working with: Frank, Ron and Lenny. They were the best in the country.

One of the first lessons I learned there was about customer perceptions. Frank told me that what the customer perceives to be true is what matters. For example, I noticed that we paid extreme attention to the cleanliness of the dining room and bathrooms at the store. Frank even made sure that the dining room trash cans were scrubbed down everyday. When I asked him about this he said that when a customer walks in the door, they will judge the cleanliness of the entire store by the state of the dining room or restrooms. I thought that was a bit silly; after all, as I told Frank, "We don't cook in the dining room." Frank smiled and told me that a customer, upon seeing a dirty restroom or dirty dining room will think to themselves, "If the part of the restaurant that I can see is this dirty, the rest of it must be filthy!" Even though our kitchen was spotless, no customer would ever see that. The best we could do was to give them confidence that it was clean by keeping the area they could see spotless. In other words, we had to understand and manage their perceptions.

Think about your clients. What fears or concerns might they have about your industry? What perceptions are you fighting? What are they hoping you can provide for them? Think about your client interaction – from start to finish.

Where are your opportunities to manage – and even shape – their perceptions?

To Your Success,

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