If you WOW a customer at the Moment of Truth , the average customer will walk away and tell 5 people about the experience.

If you fail to meet the customer's expectations at the Moment of Truth , customers are very likely to tell 11 people about the problem they had with your company.

If you drop the ball with customers at the Moment of Truth , but rebound with a quick customer recovery, research shows that the customer will tell up to 17 people about your service recovery.

Did you get that? Customers will tell 5 people if you WOW them, BUT if there's a problem and you quickly fix it, they will tell more than 3 times as many people as they would if no problem had occurred at all.

One of [+]

A couple of months ago I had a small kitchen fire in my home. All is well now, but for a few days my family and I camped out in a hotel room and once we returned home we had no oven (it was destroyed in the fire) so we were forced to eat every meal out for several days.

On the day of the fire two representatives from the insurance company told me to "Hold on to your meal receipts, send them to us and we'll cover your meals plus sales tax." After the contractors restored my home and we settled back in, I was preparing to mail in my meal receipts for reimbursement and I gave my adjuster a quick call before dropping the envelope of receipts in the mail. He explained that reimbursement was [+]

Here are three lessons about meetings that came from a walk through the forest.

1) Giant Sequoias These marvelous trees are a living example that some things take time. True, we need to work with a sense of urgency. We need to do more with less. We need to move faster than the speed of chaos. And we also need to be appropriate. Rushing through some issues can produce false solutions. For example, a group slams together an annual plan, only to find that the plan ignores real market conditions, organizational limitations, and individual support. The result is a document that no one uses. For example, a powerful group makes a decision without listening to other people's ideas. And then a bad situation becomes worse. In fact, sometimes the neglected side retaliates with such force that the original group loses status. Better: Take time to make [+]