Silent Irritant

Oisin Rogers has built his reputation on understanding that your job is to annihilate silent irritants.

At the Devonshire pub, their philosophy translates into meticulous attention to seemingly minor details. Rogers calls this the medicine cabinet philosophy, small gestures that transform customer complaints before they even arise.

This proactive approach recognises that prevention is far more powerful than correction when it comes to customer satisfaction.

Rory Sutherland gives the example of if I served you an absolutely magnificent meal, but one of the prongs of your fork was out of alignment you couldn’t enjoy the meal.

With The Devonshire, this looks like immediate acknowledgement that when customers wait, staff communicate to them “you’re going to be next, you’re going to be next” to eliminate the fear of being unseen.

It’s making sure the environment is absolutely perfect, it’s empowering staff to buy customers’ drinks spontaneously, recognising that these ‘human moments’ last way longer than any other positive experience.

This plays on psychological triggers such as negativity bias, where people remember negative experiences five to ten times more vividly than positive ones of equal intensity.

Cognitive dissonance from unmet expectations, so when reality contradicts what was promoted, customers experience tension. Loss aversion, so customers feel losses twice as intensely as equivalent gains, making service failures particularly damaging.

Coaches need to think beyond what everyone else is doing when designing their service, and think more about how they can revolutionise how they deliver to pre-emptively eliminate irritants in their process. This allows you to be in control of how you communicate with clients, but in a way where they don’t feel hard done by or like they’re missing something

24/7 Whatsapp access is not only impossible, but also gives the impression that you expect things to go wrong, and that you’ll need to be on call when they do.

Instead, think about how you can design a service so seamless and faultless that no one will need to get hold of you outside of the times you tell them