In Business, Details Matter

Confession: I’m weird when it comes to making purchases. If I’m spending over $20, I will put in hours and hours of research to try to find the best combination of great product and great value. I recently bought my first tablet, but only after approximately 2.5 years of sifting through reviews and opinions.

A few years back I went hunting for a gym. Again, I spent an insane amount of time looking for the right mix of great product (in this case, plenty of machines, a pool, a sauna, and clean) at a great price. I narrowed my choices down to a few, but was finding no real differentiators.

Then, on a review site, I saw a comment about one of the gyms that said, “Their soap smells awesome.”

Sold. The tipping point was the smell of the soap, that someone thought it smelled good enough to mention.

It simply connected with me in a real and relevant way. I can work out anywhere, but I can’t come out of just any gym smelling awesome. Only this one.

Hissing Janitors

Once, while eating at a national fast food chain, I was hissed at by a rabid, wild janitor. With blood red eyes and a slack jaw, this guy quietly stared at me, clearly bothered, while leaning on his broom. When I tried to speak to him, he hissed – literally, hissed like a cat – gave me the stink eye, and shuffled away.

I haven’t gone back to that chain. “Do their janitors hiss?” is now one of my criteria when judging an eating establishment.

Soap Matters, and Discount Programs

Just because you can’t build a marketing campaign to brag about it doesn’t make it insignificant. I don’t expect my gym to come out with a “Other Soap is Smelly” push. Nor do any restaurants have to promote the “Our Janitors Are Not Infected with Rabies, And Are Not Transitioning Werewolves” angle.

For most Access clients, promoting a discount program is not their core business, yet being able to say they have the nation’s largest discount program in their member benefits is a major differentiator between them and competitors.

From the Access perspective, it’s about a commitment to excellence on every level. We can’t just offer the best merchant funded rewards; we also have to have great customer service, excellent programmers, attentive account managers, and so on. No detail can be treated as insignificant for us, because we know that details matter to our clients.

And yes, our soap smells good. And no, we don’t have any hissing janitors. That I know of.