Quick Thoughts - Turn Pain Into Joy To Win

Shock your customers with happy moments when they EXPECT painful moments.

On Turning Pain Into Joy For Your Customers

I’ve been on hiatus a bit with these, as I’ve been traveling Central America. Travel is always an amazing way to expand ones worldview, which can be applied to business and life in so many ways.

While I’ve actually witnessed many things here from the local populations that I’d love to dive into and talk about - today I’m sharing an experience with an international mega-corporation. Hilton Hotels.

As many travelers do, mid-trip we decided to divert from our original plans and dive deeper into a location that interested us. That meant changing some travel and lodging.

I Expected Pain

As I was changing my hotel about 48 hours before our expected checkin, I took inventory of my feelings and expectations:

I expected to spend a lot of time doing this, get pushback and possibly be told that I cannot do make this change. I was certain I would pay a fee, or lose most of my money.

Why Did I Expect This?

Why did I have those expectations? Because that’s industry norm. In general, the travel industry is notorious for punishing changes and penalizing last minute activity.

The rest of the industry set this expectation for me, not Hilton themselves.

I Received Joy

Instead, in about 3 minutes, I had my room canceled and I was told that all my money had been refunded. Zero pain, low effort, full satisfaction.

What Hilton did was simply solve my problem. When you have a great product, you can (and should) behave this way because. you know you’ll win the next decision.

In doing so, they took an experience that is naturally upsetting and made it joyous. They leveraged an unhappy path their competitors were creating for customers and turned it into a happy path for me.

(and because I’ll be comparing them to the competitors who create unhappy paths in the future, they’re leveraging this to their advantage)

What Pain Do Your Customers Expect?

The fitness industry is notorious for creating customer pain when it’s not necessary. These pains are always created when the company is looking out for its interests over those of the customer.

Here are some areas I know bigger franchise and corporate players are exploiting the customer for their benefit. Can you create happy moments around any of these?

• Sales Process

• Late Fee policies

• Cancellation policies

• Payment terms

• Initiation Fees

• Membership Pausing

• Coaching Access