A nice bloke called Jamie has just installed a heating system in our house and he’s done a wonderful job too. It’s particularly impressive given the scale of the task: he was replacing three separate heating systems, none of which worked very well and he did it, with two assistants, in just nine days.

Only one thing doesn’t work as planned. The house is divided into three zones, with the office on its own heating loop so that we’re not heating 3000 square feet that we’re not using a lot of the time. Each zone has its own wireless thermostat, which controls the business end of the system down in the cellar. Despite having a theoretical range of 30m (presumably requiring the clear lines of site you tend not to find in houses with rooms) the thermostat can’t reach its base unit.

Jamie phoned the manufacturer for advice. The first time he called he got a recorded message saying the department was busy, he was on hold for a long time and then he gave up, thinking he could call them at another, hopefully less busy time.

The next time he called, he anticipated a bit of a delay so he placed his phone on speaker and carried on working on a boiler whilst listening to a message about how important his call was to the manufacturer.

Just as he’s thinking the call will be answered, and this is about twenty minutes after the first message, another message tells him that they’re too busy and he should try later. Then they cut him off.

The first time this happened he assumed he’d been unlucky, so he tried again. Then he got the second message and disconnection almost immediately.

Consequently, the next time he phoned, and his ‘important’ call was put on hold he thought it might be answered. Fifteen minutes later he got the ‘too busy’ message again and was disconnected.

Now he was even keener to speak to someone, so that he could tell them how annoying this experience was. So he tried again, only now with the sort of growing anger that only customer ‘help’ lines and crashing computer systems can trigger in normally reasonable people.

In the end all that Jamie got from the experience was the decision never to use the company’s products again. For my part the name of the company concerned was mentioned with sufficient frequency and irritation that, now, I would never choose to buy anything from them either, for fear of having the same experience: I’ve been most emphatically warned.

It’s often said that a lot of people will tell other people if they have bad service, whereas very few will mention good service.

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.

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

Image courtesy: Hartwig HKD