The average American has over 3000 customer experiences daily.

And Joey Coleman of Design Symphony understands what it takes to make a customer feel good about you.

In an era where "everyone competes on speed (thanks to ups, fedex) and price (china, walmart)," customers look at you through the lens of

• physical performance
• senses stimulated
• emotions evoked

Every single interaction (your lobby, business card, email, voice mail, how you dress) either shapes a good or poor experience.

How can you impact the situation so that a customer is WOWed by working with you or your company?

Joey spent lunchtime with a number of partners in the Microsoft DC office talking about this very issue.

First, he asked us to list our bad customer experiences.

Then, he asked us to list our good customer experiences.

He then worked us all through an exercise to reconfigure how we look at the experience we are giving our customers?

1. is your website bland or boring?
2. when you give your elevator pitch, do you say trite phrases like "Microsoft partner," "trusted advisor," and "outsourced IT?" or do you say, "I save the world by installing Exchange Server!!"  Ok, slight hyperbole, but you get the point.

I met Joey at the Seth Godin event at U of MD and he astounded me with his, yes, business card. It is the ONLY card I have kept in the last year!

The guy just gets it.