"Wow" customer service can be a huge win for any business, but you need to know how to do it right.
After you task your employees with delivering "wow" (which I define as “service that goes beyond fulfilling basic customer expectations, and does so in a creative, unexpected way"), you can get ready to enjoy the upsides of wow, but you also need to be on the alert against its misapplication, particularly by employees haven’t yet grasped the nuances involved.
First, the upsides of wow; there are two (as I spell out at greater length in this article). Wow customer service moments are one of the best ways to connect with customers and inspire them to return time and again, likely referring their friends as well. That’s because humans use narrative as the basis for our decisions and behaviors; we think in terms of stories, both the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we hear from others.
The second, less obvious benefit is that the act of creating wow experiences has power to inspire the employees involved, who get to apply their creativity and judgment to the effort. This is an employee development and retention tool par excellence, because it fits with one of the most important principles of talent management: let employees take part in the design of their own work.

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There’s a right time–and a wrong time–for wow customer service
So, what could go wrong? Well, for starters, it can be hard for newly-energized employees to understand that customers don’t always have time to be wowed. Customers are often in a rush, and it’s important that employees learn to temper or cut short their efforts to turn an interaction into an experience if they’re getting signals of impatience from a customer. More generally, it’s important that employee efforts at wow don’t run afoul of a customer’s desire to stay within their own private bubble—a bubble that should only be entered when an employee has implied permission from your customer. (A customer should be left alone within their personal privacy bubble, without interruption, if they’re glued to a personal communication device, or interacting with their family and colleagues, or trying to get work done, or are otherwise occupied or preoccupied in such a way that a wow would be seen as interruption or even an invasion.)
Having said that, wow doesn’t necessarily need to take a lot of time or slow down your customer. A few days before the opening game of what we call Seahawks Season here in Seattle, my wife was standing at the counter waiting for her latte at our local Starbucks. A barista noticed my wife’s blue and green Seahawks iPhone case and asked if she’d like a matching Seahawks-themed cuff for her drink, featuring the jersey numbers of a particular, favorite player if she had one. It was a minor wow that only took a moment (a moment when she was stuck waiting anyway), yet it succeeded in perking up her morning, beyond what the caffeine would have accomplished on its own.
Wow can’t make up for operational flakiness
The other caveat to remember is that wow isn’t enough. Although a customer who’s had an emotional, inspiring wow experience with your company is likely to cut you a bit of slack if things go wrong on occasionin the future, continual screwups are sure to drive almost any customer elsewhere. If Southwest Airlines were known for sending those passenger bags–checked for free, but still!–to a different destination than it sent the passengers, then no amount of wow would be enough to save them. Likewise, if Nordstrom’s tailors were known to be ham-fisted, or if USAA were guilty of slow or inaccurate payment of insurance claims.
Wow, in other words, can’t make up for errors, disorganization, inconvenience, flakiness.That's too big a burden to place on it. So, be sure you’ve put the necessary work into operational excellence to support your customers day in and day out. Even if they don’t precisely experience this as wow, they’ll still feel appreciative.