You’ve surely been there, and it’s not a good time—face to face with a customer so upset that he’s jabbing his finger in your chest, literally screaming at you, the veins in his forehead ready to jump out and strangle you. He’ll ruin your day—but could he hold the key to building your business?

When you or a member of your staff upsets a customer so much that he can’t contain himself and can’t help but get in your face right away or pick up the phone as soon as he gets in his car, that customer is exhibiting what’s known formally as a “visceral response”—a fancy way of saying a gut–level reaction. Your business has failed that customer to such a high (perceived) degree that he’s so upset he can’t hold it in. He’s got to tell someone…and you’re the first one he’s going to tell.*

There’s a very important lesson hiding in here, though, that very few people ever seem to get. It’s one that can give your business a huge edge over your competition:

Gut reactions like this don’t have to be negative—the opposite of furious is deliriously happy.

Look at it this way: a terrible service experience creates strongly negative emotion. The opposite would be, a terrific service experience creates strongly positive emotion. So if you treat people the opposite of terrible, you can elicit the opposite gut reaction—one that’s overwhelmingly positive. One that customer is going to feel compelled to talk about—with you, and with other people as well.

In fact, this phenomenon forms the heart of a very serviceable mission statement. I used it years ago when I ran a private golf club: “We will provide every member and every guest with remarkable service.” The footnote was: “‘Remarkable service’ is service so outstanding, so uncompromisingly attentive and personalized, that the recipient will feel compelled to remark on it to someone (or everyone).”

Will you get every customer to gush to you and all their friends and coworkers about how great your business is? Not a chance. And even if you could somehow provide perfect service to everyone, some people won’t acknowledge it; it’s just not in their nature. Of course, with flawed people (that is, humans) working for you in a flawed system (that is, one created by humans), there’s just no way you can sustain that remarkably high a level of service without the occasional lapse.

But just setting the bar that high can have quite an uplifting effect on your staff, and even on you—with a lofty service goal staring you in the face every day, you and your people will know you have to bring your best game every day (and you’ll have a standard to measure your successes and failures against, as well as a starting point for analyzing both).

It’s a pretty inexpensive (that is, free) way to develop a standard of service that will wow your customers on a regular basis. And the fringe benefit—a huge one—is that striving to give your customers service way beyond what they’ll get across town is the surest way to turn them into your best advertisement: when your customers feel so strongly about how well you treat them that they feel they have to tell people, they’ll tell people. And ta–da! You’ve created an army of evangelists who can’t wait to spread the good word on your behalf.

There’s no better, more economical, more effective way to advertise your business: take great enough care of people that they’ll bring you more people to take great care of. And your business will grow and grow.

*Unfortunately, if you don’t handle that irate customer properly, he’s going to go on to tell a lot of other people how badly your business treated him—a dangerous negative, yes, but one that can easily be turned around into a positive. We’ll talk more about it in a later post.