The second you open the email, it’s obvious. The sender is not happy with you. Not even a little bit. Something you or your company did or said provoked this valued customer to hammer out a blistering note of disapproval in which they threaten to transfer their allegiance (and their money) somewhere else. Usually to your arch-rival.

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Being great at what you do is about more than being a competent professional or a skilled craftsman. It’s not enough to deliver a great product or service. It is about the total customer experience, from the first encounter until the last—and everything in between.

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Perhaps you’ve noticed: customer service has deteriorated noticeably since the recession began. Fewer waiters in restaurants. Slower room service in hotels. Longer wait times for support.

This is hardly surprising. With significant layoffs in almost every industry, fewer people are available to provide the level of service you have come to expect. Everyone is scrambling. Many are stumbling.

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Bad customer experiences can be great opportunities to transform not-wow into wow. When people have a bad customer experience, their expectations are lowered. Usually, this results in the customer abandoning the product or service and moving to a competitor.

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We’ve all heard the aphorism, “The devil is in the details.” Conversely, Oprah likes to say, “Love is in the details.” But which is it? Actually both. The details matter—more than you might think.

Yesterday, I visited three different retail stores trying to find a pair of shoes to replace a pair I gave away in Africa. I was looking for a fairly casual shoe style. Nothing fancy. Just something to wear with jeans.

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Recently, I had an interesting conversation with one of our editors at Thomas Nelson. He had just finished a new manuscript from one of our biggest authors. I asked, “So what did you think?”

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Today, I went to the doctor to get my shots for a trip I am taking to Ethiopia. This is the first time I have had to do this. I assumed that it would take 30 minutes—tops. Not so much. It actually ended up taking almost two hours.

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Validation. Everyone needs it. Hardly anyone gets it. Yet it is the very thing that most people crave. More than sex. More than money. More than drugs.

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It takes years to build a brand. Unfortunately, there aren’t many shortcuts. You build a brand—like a reputation—one impression at a time. Every encounter with a customer results in either a “deposit” or a “withdrawal” in your “brand account.”

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In many of his books, Andy Andrews talks about the butterfly effect, a theory put forward in a doctoral thesis by Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist.

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