Honor Your Customer’s Point of View

My optometrist is a fine retailer. He keeps to schedule while also taking time to establish rapport before beginning the exam. He supports the community. And he usually guides the patient toward the right decision without the patient feeling pressured.
     However, I wasn’t consciously thinking about all this when the incident occurred: As my eye exam was done, he said, “Your vision has changed, but not dramatically. You could get new eyeglasses or stay with the same ones for another year.”
     He’d checked out my eyeglasses at the start of the exam and had handed them back to me then. Now I handed them to him again and said, “My glasses have a scratch that I can sometimes sense after I’ve been reading for a while.”
     He held up the eyeglasses, looked through the lenses, polished them with a cloth, looked through the lenses again, then looked at me with eyebrows arched and said, “That scratch is so small you wouldn’t notice it when you’re reading.”
     Immediately, I felt a flush of emotion. But I wasn’t sure what it was about. Research at Columbia University, building on some of history’s earliest systematic studies in experimental psychology, found that the emotions we experience are based on how we interpret the physiological sensations in our body. Whether a consumer is angry or surprised depends on whether they expect to be angry or surprised.
     I hadn’t really expected to be either. My first interpretation was that I was irritated. Who was this optometrist to tell me the scratch was nothing to notice? But then I realized that what I truly was feeling was substantial surprise. Here is the man who, during the exam, was asking me again and again, “Which looks clearer to you, this one or this one?” He was showing great deference to my judgment. And then in one sentence, he was contradicting my judgment.
     Okay, I was both irritated and surprised. Suppose he’d said, “That scratch is very small. Still, if you’re finding it bothers you, you might want to get new eyeglasses.” He’d be honoring my point of view. That would have been consistent with my positive impression of him.
     I’m not suggesting you uncritically accept each customer’s point of view as your own. I am suggesting you base your responses on how your customer sees their world.

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