Why Bad Service is Remembered

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When service is bad it turns into a story, or even a saga. 

All the elements are there for a gripping yarn:

• The characters (a goody and a baddy) 
• A setting (in this case a customer service phone line) 
• The plot 
• Conflict (the heart of a good ‘bad service’ story) 
• A theme or moral (in this case, 'if you’re smart you won’t use this company either'). 

People love stories: in fact they seem to connect directly with how our brains work.  Think about it, virtually everything around is story-based: movies, books, TV, gossip, conversations, advertising…

The great thing with stories is that you get to learn things without someone telling you what to think – or at least not directly.  You draw your own conclusions, albeit based on a very one-sided account of an event, but it feels super-meaningful. 

Jamie could have said, “Don’t use this company; I couldn’t get through to their customer service line.”  But would I have felt compelled to avoid the company?  I doubt it.

Recent research using brain imaging has helped us understand why stories are so powerful.  They show that when we read a story we create a mental simulation of what we’re reading. 

Rather than being a passive exercise, readers’ brains link the events and sensory experiences in a story to similar first-hand experiences.  This enables us to run the fictitious events in our mind in a way that closely mirrors the brain activity that would occur if we were experiencing the events for real.

So when someone reads (or hears) a story about bad customer service what happens in our brain is very similar to what would have happened if we’d experienced the same painful event ourselves.

It’s easy to see why this is useful in evolutionary terms; I can learn from your bad experiences without having to actually have them myself. 

I got Jamie’s ‘two hours wasted’ experience in a three minute edited version and can draw exactly the same conclusions.

And this is one of the reasons that service recovery – fixing something when it goes wrong – is so important to a business.  It’s a chance to create a positive story, where you or your company comes good in the end. 

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Source: Washington University in St. Louis. "Readers Build Vivid Mental Simulations Of Narrative Situations." February 2009

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