How to Make Your Customers Feel Like Your #1 Priority
An Above & Beyond Story that Literally Saved a Customer’s Life
Check out this incredible story of a Florida chef searching for his loyal customer who hadn’t been in.
@nothing.but.the.news man ate at the same Florida restaurant every day for a decade. When he stopped showing up, the chef went looking for him.
*Related – 5 Customer Experience Strategies For 2026
This Week’s Customer Experience Microlearning
Have your team answer these three questions to focus on building a consistent, exceptional customer experience interaction.
CX + AI
Talk about convenience and ease of doing business. Target stores have launched an app featuring their own AI-powered tools, including one that enables users to scan their written grocery list and have the items automatically added to their cart.
*Related – The Experience Revolution Livestream Quarterly Workshops
How to Make Your Customers Feel Like Your #1 Priority
“The heart of hospitality is the ability to focus completely and totally on one person, even if only for a matter of seconds, yet long enough that you’ve got a clear connection… It’s the ability to focus so intently on a guest that the rest of the world ceases to exist…It just requires your full and complete attention at a given moment. You have to develop the discipline of momentarily blotting out the rest of the world.” –Patrick O’Connell chef and proprietor of The Inn at Little Washington)
We live in the “digital disruption era,” and human interactions are less frequent. As a result, when our employees interact with customers, they need to be more intentional and meaningful.
What drives today’s customers are emotions and feelings, some of which can’t be expressed in words and are triggered unconsciously. The most important element in customers choosing who they buy from is how a brand makes them feel. How employees make them feel.
One of the most common customer experience phrases in 2025 was “to make the customer feel seen and heard.” I love that. However, what I haven’t seen is the “how”. How to train team members to execute that consistently.
Remove Personal Interpretations
One of the key attributes of what elite CX brands do better than their competitors is that they remove personal interpretations. If you tell 50 employees to deliver genuine hospitality, you will get 50 interpretations based on their life experiences and what their previous employers taught them. You need to remove personal interpretations in all aspects of your customer experience deliverables. For instance, clearly define what you mean.
- Deliver Genuine Hospitality by executing The Five E’s– Eye contact, Enthusiastic greeting, Ear-to-ear smile, Engage, & Educate
- Make a Service Recovery by providing LEAST– Listen, Empathize, Apologize, Solve, and Thank
- Build a rapport be learning their FORD– Family, Occupation, Recreation, & Dreams
So how do you create such an experience and train your employees to provide it? Examine every touch point in the customer journey to see if you have built in the feeling of “cared for.” Focus on every type of interaction a customer-facing employee can have, whether it is in person (face-to-face), on the phone, or on Zoom.
You need to actually break it down and role-play it. Demonstrate the difference between a transaction and making the customer feel like your number one priority.
Picture buying a cup of coffee. There are three possible outcomes to this interaction.
- The most common is that the person standing behind the counter says, “What can I get you?” The customer tells them their order or hands over what they have selected from the display, and the employee scans it. Says, “Is there anything else?” And then processes your payment. The employee may even make eye contact a few times.
- As the customer approaches, the cashier executes The Five E’s. Before the employee grabs the customer’s products to scan, looks you in the eye and says with a smile, “How is your day?” She pauses and acknowledges your response. She then asks, “What can I get you?” While she types your order on her computer and scans your products, she asks, “Do you have anything exciting happening today?” As she processes your order, she concludes with, “Thank you, and hope you enjoy (whatever the customer told her).”
The key is the 2-second pause and acknowledgement of the customer’s responses. This doesn’t hurt the employees’ productivity, but it has a significant impact on how the customer and employee feel.
Now, consider the two different scenarios: transactional versus demonstrating how to make each customer feel like your number one priority at every customer touch point (in an in-person meeting, on the phone, or on Zoom).
Want your customers to feel truly seen, heard, and valued, every time?
Let’s build a customer experience your employees can execute consistently.
