I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.

And now a special message for all you guerilla marketers out there. You may not have the time or budget to launch an in-depth customer satisfaction survey, but down deep you already know what bugs your customers—so start there.

Frontline employees at Lobridge Family Deli walked in their customer’s shoes for a week and asked themselves, “What irritates me about our deli?”

By week’s end, they had identified and begun eliminating 41 annoying items, including brick-hard butter pats; slow lines in the morning; fruit flies in the dessert section; and thumb impressions on the jelly donuts. Their slogan became: “Eliminate life’s little irritations.”

If you think this advice applies only to smaller companies, check out this sidebar from the business section of USA Today: John Barrier, 59, parked at Old National Bank one day and went in to cash a $100 check from his daughter. When he asked to have his parking ticket validated, the teller told him, “Sorry, Mr. Barrier, our machine won’t validate your ticket; you have to make a deposit to qualify for the parking credit.”

John smiled and thanked the teller. But a few days later he delivered a written complaint to ONB, accompanied by withdrawing $1-million from his $2-million account. Why? Because his life was already too full of little irritations. As the movie character in one of my all-time favorite films, “Network”, put it: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

As for Old National Bank, they’ve since been acquired.

Remember:
• Service isn’t a big thing; it’s a million little things.
• Most customers won’t tell you what’s bugging them, they’ll just walk away.
• Seek out and eliminate life’s petty irritations on your customer’s behalf.