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Moments with presence Will your customer remember your encounters? Comment on this newsletter at yastrow.com Think of the last year of your life. These past 365 days included more than half a million minutes. How many of these minutes do you still remember? Certain moments from the past year stand out clearly in your memory. When these moments happened, they were imbued with such a strong sense of presence that you were able to hold on to them, and now, months later, you can feel these moments clearly. But most of those 500,000 minutes have disappeared, and are no longer part of your life. Hundreds of meaningless conversations, most of the transactions you had in retail stores, virtually all of the commercials you saw on TV; these moments were so fleeting as they happened that your brain didn’t deem them worthy of easily-accessible storage. Now, consider one of your customers, someone with whom you have worked over the last year. He has also lived more than 500,000 minutes during that same time. He also only remembers a small portion of those minutes. Of the moments he does remember, how many involve you? In Chapter Two of We, I share the story of my first memory in life. When I was 21 months old, my grandmother took me on an airplane trip, after a visit to her house. For the entire hour and a half on the plane she was completely engaged in the moment, teaching me to say, “I love you daddy,” so I could give my father an excited greeting when he met us at the airport. By being fully engaged with me, locked in together in a shared activity for an hour-and-a-half, I still have this very clear memory of my grandmother from that plane ride 47 years ago. She is sitting in the window seat, looking at me as the sun streams in the window from behind her and creates a halo of light in her hair. My grandmother teaches us a very valuable lesson about creating relationship-building encounters with customers. When you and a another person are completely engaged in a moment together, unhindered by the distractions of life, the moment you share together is imbued with a strong sense of presence, a feeling of “here and now” that is so palpable that you are both able to turn that moment into a lasting, tangible memory. What about you? What makes certain moments become embedded in your memory? What is it about their sense of presence that is so tangible, so real and so certain that these moments survive the noise and become part of your life’s narrative? Amos
Oz, the great Israeli writer, wrote a 500+ page autobiography, A
Tale of Love and Darkness, covering his life up until age 12. Five
hundred pages up Wow. Think of your business interactions. How many are rote, routine, sterile – and headed for the purgatory of forgotten experiences – and how many are fresh and alive, vibrating with the “nervous quivering of a gazelle’s skin in the moment before it takes flight?” A moment with presence is the setting for a memory-rich, relationship-building encounter. Once you and your customer are fully engaged together in a real, life-rich moment, you are ready to create a relationship-building encounter. (For more on the other elements of a relationship-building encounter, conversation and uniqueness, see Chapter Two in We, or my ebook, Encounters, which is available free to all subscribers to this newsletter or my blog.) Your customers lead busy, crowded lives. If you want their interactions with you to stand out and have meaning within life’s cacophony, ensure that the moments you share with them are special, tangible, real and alive. Imbue them with a strong sense of presence. Take Notice When you interact with businesses this week, as a customer, notice how often their people attempt to engage you and create a moment with a strong sense of presence. Does it seem like the moment is just another meaningless instant for the other person, or does he/she treat it (and you) as special and worthy of attention? Whether it is the person taking your order at Starbucks, a sales clerk helping you in a clothing store, or a banker discussing a multi-million dollar line of credit with you, sense whether this person tries to make this moment something other than ordinary. How do you compare? As you notice the way other businesses treat the moments they share with you, notice your interactions with your customers. Do you have opportunities to make the moments you have with your customers more real and more full of the stuff that makes life interesting? Try this While interacting with customers this week, ask yourself: “Will this be a moment my customer will remember a year from now, once he has live through another 500,000 minutes?” As you ask this, engage fully in the moment with your customer. Think of the alertness of the gazelle’s skin quivering before it takes flight, and nurture this one encounter with care, imbuing it with a presence, clarity and tangibility will give it a fighting chance in the “survival of the fittest” that is our memory. If your engagements with customers are so real, so tangible and so meaningful that you earn the right to be part of the small slice of moments they remember and that impact their lives, you will be well on the way to creating strong, sustainable relationships with those customers. Engage your customers in a rich, alive, present moment, and they will retain you in their future memories.
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until
age 12! (Most of us couldn’t fill up more than a small notebook.)
But Oz embraced so many of the first six million minutes of his life
that he was able to create a narrative that my friends and I have found
spellbinding and exciting. At one point in the book, while describing
his childhood memories of his family’s Saturday evening visits
to the Jerusalem home of Nobel laureate writer S.Y. Agnon, Oz describes
the way memories become etched for him: “… living memory,
like ripples in water or the nervous quivering of a gazelle’s
skin in the moment before it takes flight, comes suddenly and trembles
in a single instant in several rhythms or various focuses, before being
frozen and immobilized into the memory of a memory.”
How to create relationship-building encounters, instead of relationship-eroding
transactions 