With Halloween approaching, lately I’ve been thinking about ghouls, goblins, and things that go bump in the night.

While carving a pumpkin over the weekend, my mind wandered to a memorable ghost story and the elements that made it special. As I recalled these ingredients, it occurred to me that some of the same principles apply to creating a memorable customer experience—without the goblins.

An effective ghost story creates a compelling atmosphere. Listeners are gradually removed from their comfortable surroundings into a dark and unfamiliar place where all of their senses will be engaged by the storyteller.

Likewise, atmosphere is critical to fulfilling customer experiences. That’s why the themed hotels along the Las Vegas Strip spare no expense in the design and furnishing of their hotels’ lobbies, casinos, and public space. This atmosphere sets the stage for customers’ experiences to unfold.

An effective ghost story evokes a listener’s feelings. Consider your own experience with ghost stories. The good ones brought out feelings such as anxiety, fear, alarm, surprise, or suspense.

While the feelings differ, a memorable customer experience also evokes feelings such as: delight, importance, pleasure, or confidence. It’s important to influence the feelings and emotions of your customers. Perhaps the easiest way to accomplish this is to smile, make eye contact, add enthusiasm to your voice, and, when you have access to it, use the customer’s name.

An effective ghost story requires a plan, a purpose—a plot. The listener craves a reason to continue listening. He is drawn in by a mesmerizing opening, gripped by a spellbinding story, and startled by an unexpected ending. A good plot is original and leaves a lasting impression.

Customer experiences also unfold like a good story. A customer wants reassurance that she has made a good decision about where to spend her time and money. She is pleased by a positive first impression, appreciates the assurance of an attentive staff, and remembers a fond farewell.

Unless you’re Wes Craven or Stephen King, your goal is probably not to frighten your customers. Even so, by applying some of the elements of a good ghost story to shaping customers’ experiences, you may succeed in scaring your competition. ; )

Happy Haunting!

I was reading the book Revolutionize Your Customer Experience by Colin Shaw and came across the following excerpt from Duane Francis, CEO, Mid-Columbia Medical Center, The Dalles, OR:

“We want to create a non-institutional environment where patients can feel more like individuals and valued as a whole human being, rather than just a diagnosis in bed three, or the injury in bed two, and being treated as a transaction. Therefore we have created an environment that is susceptible to healing. For example, we use a lot of water features in our facility. We have a waterfall in an open-air atrium: there is open-air access from all of the floors of our hospital, where you can hear the sound of cascading water. We also use salt-water aquariums because we know it creates a soothing and calming environment. We have fully stocked kitchens on every patient floor where we invite the volunteers, loved ones, or community members to come in and bake cookies or fresh baked bread because the smells wafting down the hall create a “homey” environment and a sense and feeling that is not stressful, and is actually designed to reduce stress. We spend a lot of time on those environment issues, what the patients see, taste, touch, and smell.”

Mid-Columbia Medical Center is well on its way to providing patients with memorable customer experiences. Consider its focus on the sense of smell (e.g., baked cookies or fresh baked bread) alone:

Memories, imagination, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel. In humans there are four genes for vision, whereas there are 1,000 allocated to scent, which means we have the ability to differentiate more than 10,000 odors. According to the Sense of Smell Institute, 75 percent of all emotions we generate are due to what we smell.

The results are amazing. Overall length of stay has steadily declined even though the level of average illness that Mid-Columbia Medical Center sees with its patients has gone steadily up. They are able to admit patients and treat them in a shorter amount of time. In essence, they are healing faster.