It was the late 1980's, and there was a boxing match between two fighters - Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler. The typical round went like this:The bell rang. Sugar Ray came out on fire. He was dancin'. He was jabbin'. He was wowing the crowd with his boxing prowess for the first 15-30 seconds of each round. Then - for the next 2 minutes or 2 minutes and 15 seconds of the round - the fight would slow down. Hagler would start to take control. The fight would become more of a plodding fight with less excitement and movement. Then - with about 15-30 seconds left in the round - Sugar Ray would take over again. He would just light up!
The footwork was there; the crowd went wild, and then the bell would ring.
If you looked at the punch statistics at the end of the fight, Hagler threw a ton more punches. Hagler connected on a ton more punches. But if you looked on the judges' scorecards, Sugar Ray Leonard won. It's because, when the judges were scoring their rounds, what was more on their minds was how the rounds started and how they ended, and Sugar Ray won the starts and the ends of the rounds.
So what does this have to do with customer service?
When customers evaluate how you handled their request or if they're asked how service-oriented you were, much of what they'll base their response on is how you started and how you ended the conversation. That first impression and that close of the conversation make a huge impression on the customer's overall perception of how you handled their request.
