Different People

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"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." — Warren Buffett

Plot the height of a thousand people on a graph and you get a smooth bell curve. Most folks clump in the average-middle, with a few extra tall and a few really short sloped on either side.

It's the shape we're trained to expect, so when we think about our customers, we tend to picture the same thing.

That mental model is wrong for customer experience.

Look at the reviews on any product page, any restaurant, any online course. The graph isn't a smooth curve. It's two big groups — the people who loved it and the people who hated it — with a thin valley in the middle.

And the middle is where most of your customers sit. They just don't write reviews, don't post about you, and don't tell their friends.

So it’s not uncommon for the people generating the loudest signal about your business, to be the ones who tipped to extreme ends of the spectrum.

1️⃣ It Happens at the Edges

A customer doesn't drift gradually from "fine" to "raving fan." They find themselves in a moment. Something unexpected happens — a handwritten note, a problem solved before they had to ask, a phone call that lasted ten minutes longer than they expected — and they tip over.

A customer doesn't drift gradually from "fine" to "I'm done" either. They get a moment too. Something breaks, and how you respond either catches them or it doesn't.

These tipping moments are rare, but almost everything that matters in customer experience happens inside them.

Most of what your team handles every day is maintenance. The tipping point moments are the small handful of interactions where someone is about to form a real opinion of you.

Treating all of them with the same energy means you might be under-investing in some very meaningful moments in the customer journey.

2️⃣ The Two Voices in the Room

Inside every business, there are 2 voices making decisions about how customers get treated.

The first voice asks what an interaction costs. It builds phone trees, writes scripts to keep calls short, batches service windows to optimize routes. Every move it makes is rational, and every move optimized to save money.

The second voice asks what an interaction is worth. It looks at the same call and sees a moment where a small investment of real attention could generate a story the customer tells their friends for years.

The challenge is which voice wins the room when the decision actually gets made.

In many companies, it's the first one. Which isn’t to say that voice isn’t important. It is. It’s not reasonable to expect a business to support the unique needs/wants of every single individual customer.

But it’s probably worth at least acknowledging there are 2 voices to begin with, and both bring value to the table and have a role to play.

(btw, the same voice shows up in a one-person operation. It's the one that says "I don't have time to reply to that DM," or "the welcome email is fine.")

3️⃣ The Automation Reflex

This argument was useful three years ago. Right now it's urgent.

There's enormous pressure on every operator to deploy AI in order to automate customer-facing work…and a lot of it is reasonable.

Order status, password resets, scheduling, refunds — the maintenance work in the silent middle is exactly what should be automated.

These tipping point moments are different, because they are intentionally not efficient.

But they’re valuable because someone on the other end feels seen. "We hear you. We made a promise. We're about to break it. Here's what we're going to do about it."

That sentence does real work when a person says it and means it. It does almost no work when a chatbot generates it from a template.

As automation becomes the default everywhere, the human moments become the difference.

The bar is going to drop so low that small acts of humanity will feel remarkable.

So the question is which interactions are tipping moments, and are you protecting those moments when you’re choosing to automate others.

There's a story about the early days of Zappos I always loved.

When they hired customer service reps, Zappos put them through a few weeks of training, then offered each new hire $3,000 dollars to quit.

No drama, just “Here’s $3k to walk away today.”

The point was to filter for the people who weren't there just for the paycheck.

The ones who stayed could actually do the job, which at Zappos meant staying on the phone as long as the customer needed, because the phone wasn't a cost center.

It was the marketing department. And Zappos sold for almost a billion dollars.

You probably don't run a shoe company, but you almost certainly have tipping moments inside your work. The email a new client sends that's actually a test. The first time a subscriber hits reply. The week a project goes sideways and the conversation about what happens next will define the relationship for months to come.

The shift is small but not easy: the tipping point moments with your customers aren't interruptions to your work. They are the work.

You don't get to choose when one shows up, you only get to choose whether you're prepared to be remarkable when it does.

Copy + paste this prompt into your AI tool of choice:

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Thanks for spending time with Red Threads this week, I’m glad you’re here.

~ Jaime