When I was ten years old, during the summer months when we were out of school, my friends and I used to walk to a local shopping center to buy packs of gum or candy bars—whatever we could get for 50 cents or so.

I remember how hot the summers were in Kansas and how we would always end up at Hayward’s Pit Barbeque, a cramped restaurant at the corner of 95th and Antioch in Overland Park. The owner, Hayward Spears, at that time was the cook, cashier, table busser, and dishwasher. Our motley crew of sweaty kids would step inside the air-conditioned restaurant to cool off with no intention of buying anything.

Instead of running us out to create more room for paying customers, Hayward would bring us cups of ice water. The image is still so vivid. Do you recall those textured red and gold plastic cups? It seems like most barbeque and pizza restaurants used that style of cup back then. He’d bring over a tray of those cups with the condensation trickling down the sides and we would each take one and quench our thirsts.

Why so much detail in that description? Because it was a powerful memory for a ten year old boy that left a lasting impression.

In the years since that time, Hayward has expanded his barbeque empire to include a much larger restaurant near the corner of Antioch and College Boulevard, a banquet facility, catering, and offers a full line of barbeque sauces, which have become a staple of grocery and specialty stores throughout the Midwest.

A few years ago when I was back in Overland Park on business, I stopped into Hayward’s as I always do when I return. This time, to my delight, I saw Hayward greeting customers inside the entryway! I introduced myself, we shook hands, and I told him the same story I’m telling you. I told Hayward that, even though Kansas City is filled with quality barbeque restaurants, I always return to his restaurant because of the treatment I received three decades earlier as a sweaty kid on summer break.

Not surprisingly, Hayward has heard similar stories from other customers who themselves go out of their way to buy his barbeque. In fact, Hayward’s is so popular that they’re now serving more than five thousand customers a week!

There’s a saying that if you do it right every time, you’ll be doing it right at the right time. I bet Hayward Spears had no idea back then that his actions would make such a lasting impression on me that I would be posting a blog 33 years later about the memorable customer service I received.

Then again, did we even know what a blog was in 1976?

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.

When the automated hotel wake-up call arrives in the morning, what does the message say? In my experience, the message often sounds something like this: “Good morning. Today’s weather forecast calls for partly sunny skies, breezy, with a high temperature of 52 degrees. Thank you for choosing the XYZ hotel.”

Some hotels take it a step further and include a marketing message such as: “Why not begin your day with a hot breakfast in the XYZ restaurant on the main level? Our breakfast buffet is priced at only $11.95.”

Either way, 80 percent of guests are frequent travelers and hear the same types of predictable wake-up call messages wherever they go. On rare occasions, guests will receive a personal wake up call from an engaged employee who has a bit of enthusiasm in his or her voice. This will make an impression and, in doing so, will become memorable. That’s a good thing in customer service.

Personalized hotel wake-up calls are more, well, personal than automated calls. Even so, they are less common these days as hotels have largely moved to the efficiency of having guests program their own wake-up calls from their guest room phone. In fairness, some guests may even prefer this method for its expediency and accuracy.

So what’s a hotel to do? They want to be memorable and distinguish themselves in the hearts and minds of their guests but it may be impractical or cost-prohibitive to place personalized wake-up calls to every guest.

Consider this sample wake-up call script from the British actor Stephen Fry (Jeeves of Jeeves and Wooster fame): “<discreet cough> Good morning. I’m so sorry to disturb you, but it appears to be morning. Very inconvenient, I agree. I believe it is the rotation of the earth that is to blame.”

Now maybe this script doesn’t fit the style or personality of your hotel. That’s okay. You have to do what works for you and your clientele. Personally, I think most guests of most hotels would laugh out loud at messages like this one. Not only that but they’d have a funny and memorable story to share with the colleagues or customer they meet with later that day!

The French novelist, Colette, said, “Total absence of humor renders life impossible.” I would add that the deliberate inclusion of appropriate humor makes guest experiences memorable.

And, when hotels are trying to distinguish themselves from competitors in a crowded marketplace, memorable beats the alternative!