The Superpower that Transforms Relationships
In today’s fast-paced business environment, delivering comfort is one of the most overlooked yet transformative aspects of customer service and relationship-building. In this episode of CoolTimeLife, I explore the profound impact that comfort can have on both personal and professional interactions, making it an essential tool for success. This episode explores how comfort differs from satisfaction, why it must precede satisfaction, and how it serves as a currency for building lasting trust with customers, clients, and teams.
Why Comfort Matters
Comfort is a primal human need, rooted in Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It creates a sense of safety and stability, acting as the antidote to fear, which often dictates decision-making and resistance to change. Comfort fosters a relationship where customers and employees feel valued and cared for, something crucial in creating loyalty and driving success. Unlike satisfaction, which comes after a positive experience, comfort lays the groundwork by reducing stress and building trust at the outset of any interaction.
Storytelling: A Gateway to Comfort
In this episode, I highlight the power of storytelling as a universal tool for delivering comfort. The phrase, “Let me tell you a story,” has a magical effect: it relaxes the audience and transports people to a place of ease. Whether you’re a professional speaker, musician, or manager, sharing relatable stories can connect deeply with your audience or team, providing reassurance and a path forward.
Practical Tips for Delivering Comfort
1. Proactive Communication: Small gestures like sending reminders or updates reassure clients and employees that their concerns are being addressed. For example, a musician can provide updates leading up to a performance, easing the event planner’s anxieties.
2. Expectation Management: A quick response to let someone know when to expect a follow-up is far more comforting than silence. It turns uncertainty into assurance.
3. Addressing Technology Fears: The rise of AI and other technologies can create discomfort, but leaders can ease fears by explaining how these tools enhance rather than replace human roles, as illustrated through real-world examples of photographers and accountants leveraging AI to improve productivity.
Comfort as a Leadership Strategy
Comfort is equally essential within organizational culture. Engaged employees who feel secure and respected are more likely to stay and perform better. Leaders can provide this through clear communication, empathy, and consistent support, particularly during periods of change, such as the introduction of new technologies or processes.
Key Takeaways
I encourage listeners to dedicate time to delivering comfort as part of a daily work strategy. By proactively managing client and employee expectations, sharing stories, and reframing change as an opportunity rather than a threat, you can turn fear into trust and satisfaction into loyalty.
Whether you’re dealing with customers, employees, or adapting to emerging technologies like Generative AI, comfort is your greatest ally in fostering connections and inspiring confidence. Tune in to this episode for actionable insights and transformative stories that show how delivering comfort can set you apart in today’s competitive world.
Full Transcript and Images
Do you want to know one of the most powerful phrases in all business communication? It’s this: “Let me tell you a story.” Why is it so powerful? Because it gives people comfort, and comfort is one of the most powerful states that a human being can attain. “Let me tell you a story.” I have spent my life behind a microphone, much of it on-stage in front of a live audience. And I can tell you there is something magic that goes through an audience when they hear that phrase, “let me tell you a story.” When you say those words, you get to see your audience visibly relax. They settle a little more in their seats. They appear to connect a little bit with memories of childhood, to a time when a parent or caregiver was there to tell stories and to transport their children to a place of peace, and soon, sleep. Stories are also the essence of entertainment, like movies and TV shows – an opportunity to escape the concerns and problems of day-to-day life, if just for a while. Audience members, upon hearing that phrase, will transition to a state of acceptance knowing that the experience to come will be comfortable – it will not be mentally taxing or socially stressful. It will be warm and safe, and it will be theirs. That’s what comfort delivers.
Hello and welcome to CoolTimeLife. I’m Steve Prentice. Each of our CoolTimeLife podcasts focuses on a topic dealing with people, productivity, technology, and work-life, and each offers ideas and facts you need to know about to thrive in today’s busy world. An index of our podcasts is available at cooltimelife.com.
You don’t have to be a professional speaker to use this storytelling magic. You don’t even have to tell stories, if you don’t want to. But what you need to do to maximize your relationships with clients or customers is to deliver comfort. That is what great relationships are built on.
The concept of comfort often gets confused with other positive customer service outcomes like satisfaction, but I would propose that these two are different. Satisfaction comes after a positive experience, but comfort precedes it. Although both are vital, no great relationship can survive without a solid comfort strategy. Comfort is currency. It is a hidden tool of success.
If you are familiar with Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, you will know that human beings assess everything they encounter through an ascending scale of concerns, from the most basic need to stay alive, meaning having access to air, water, food and shelter, to avoiding danger and harm, then feeling accepted within a tribe or community, to next feeling comfortable with themselves, and finally attaining some degree of self-actualization in terms of pursuing life goals. As living beings, we need to satisfy all five of these layers of the pyramid, and we spend our lives doing just that. Everything we encounter must essentially satisfy one of these levels to be acceptable. To see the pyramid for yourself, just Google Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and you’ll see many images of it.
Comfort, then, is the sense that things are OK. That you are safe and that you are in a good place. You can think of comfort as the opposite of fear. Fear is the most powerful emotional influence of all. Fear helps keep us alive by stringently avoiding perceived dangers. As such it guides all our decisions and actions exactly according to Maslow’s hierarchy. It makes us wary of any and all changes in our environment. Change, after all, represents an unknown, and inside any unknown lurks the possibility of danger. When a new technology or process comes into our lives, most people will greet that change negatively by asking “what will this new thing do to me,” rather than “what will it do for me?”
Some might argue that bravery is the opposite of fear, but it is not. Bravery is what we must summon up to take on the thing that causes us fear. Bravery can be the antidote to the cause of fear, but you must feel fear in order to be brave. That is why we have the expression, “feel the fear and do it anyway.”
Comfort and the customer
As we work in our jobs and careers, we are often reminded to focus on specific benchmarks of achievement such as quality, efficiency, and productivity. All of these are intended to help our customers and clients feel comfortable working with us and to continue spending their money with us. And by the way, when I talk about customers, these don’t all have to be in a private sector retail situation. This term refers to anyone with whom we have a transactional relationship, and this includes your internal customers, otherwise known as your employees or team.
Quality, efficiency and productivity seem to represent the foundations of comfort, since good quality helps keep customers happy. But, again, these are sensations that arrive as an outcome, a result of the service we deliver. As such they do not truly generate comfort, they generate satisfaction. A repeat customer becomes one who now feels comfort based on that first good experience and will be inspired to return. Internally, within an organizational culture, a repeat customer is an employee who feels engaged and respected and is therefore inspired to stick around.
Here’s an example of how comfort can be deployed.
In addition to being a professional speaker, I am also a professional musician. I admit it – I just love being on stage. Now most musicians love to play shows. Many of us feel like we live to play shows. We want to get out there and entertain audiences with our music.
To do this, musicians will tend to focus on themselves and the music that they plan to deliver once the lights go up. They will practice and rehearse to ensure they deliver a performance that people will enjoy. Their goal is to generate a high degree of satisfaction; the feeling amongst the audience of having attended a fulfilling performance. So, for many musicians, that’s when they feel the show starts and where their value begins. That’s when they define themselves as “on.”
Now let’s imagine that you yourself are not a musician, but you have been tasked to hire a musician, or a band to play a party that you are hosting in your home, or maybe one that is being put on for your company or team – a corporate event. You look around for a band that seems to fit the theme of the event, you look at a few videos, and then maybe you take the plunge and choose one.
So now, you, as the event planner, the customer, the person hiring the musician, are taking a chance. You will spend the weeks leading up to the event hoping you have made the right choice, that the band will actually show up and that its members will be professional and will be as they appear in their videos. If you are booking this for a company event, the outcome will attach itself to your reputation. If things go well, you’ll look great. If things go less well, you will be remembered for being the cause of a disappointing evening. That’s a lot of pressure to be under for all those weeks leading up to the event. It’s a lot to live with. And it is not comfortable.
This is why I offer advice – for any musicians or performers who want to hear it – that a key part of their service – the quality of their service – is the provision of comfort for the customer long before the performance itself. In other words, their performance should start weeks before they hit the stage.
What does that look like? It involves meeting with the client in advance, ideally in-person or on video chat, where the client can see and get to know the performer and start to trust them. It means sending reminders to the client at select times, maybe a month before the show, and again a week before, saying how much the band is looking forward to playing. The true meaning of such a message is, “don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten. We’re ready and we’ll be there.” It means sending a text message the day of the show, letting the client know the band is on their way,” and another when they are five minutes away. That sounds like a lot of work, but these are actions that give comfort to a client who is hoping they made the right choice. They reassure the client that they are in good hands from the very moment the relationship starts. They can relax, knowing that you are taking care of them.
Managing expectations is comfort in action
Even if you are not a performing musician yourself, I hope you can see where this is going. People like to know they can relax by turning an unknown into a known. Every professional person can do this. A quick message to let a customer know you’re on the case, you’ve got their back, that you have received their message and will be following up promptly. Whatever the right message is that will allow them to relax a little more in their chairs and know they are being taken care of, becomes a messenger of comfort.
This all might seem like common sense, but like most things, common sense is not as common as it should be. Most people are just too busy. There are so many other emails, requests, and priorities to deal with, so many other appointments to look after, there seems to be no time to do these proactive comfort things. The prevailing attitude is to simply get to a customer when you can, without any clear advance messaging; nothing to manage their expectations.
In earlier episodes of this podcast series as well as in my time management book, I talk about the power of managing expectations. It’s such a useful comfort delivery tool. Every time someone sends you a message, by email, text, or voicemail, the time until you respond is time a person spends in suspension, in limbo. “When will the message be read or heard?” they ask themselves. “When will I get my request answered?”
This situation of unknowing leaves people in a state of discomfort. But this becomes your chance to give them the comfort they need; not by necessarily replying to their message immediately, but by giving them knowledge regarding when they will receive the attention they are looking for. There’s a huge difference between saying, “I’ll get back to you at 2:00” and “I’ll get back to you when I can.” When you manage people’s expectations by giving them a specific, “suitable alternative to now,” you take care of their fears and give them something tangible to hold on to instead.
It also gives you great comfort in knowing you can focus on your work without guilt. If you are interested in learning more about these techniques, check the show notes or visit this episode’s page.
New technology
Here’s another place where comfort is desperately needed: when new technology arrives and disrupts the status quo. Right now, this means Generative AI. With all the capacities and capabilities that this technology offers, it’s no surprise that people see this as an existential threat, as in, “these technologies are coming for my job.” Again, this is a natural self-defense response, aligning with Maslow’s Hierarchy. The thing about most Generative AI products is that yes, there are a lot of things they can do that might be tasks that a person is currently paid to do. But this does not make Gen-AI human, nor does it render humans extinct. It just changes things. Your ability to explain that very fact will provide desperately needed comfort for people adrift in a sea of AI-Generated unknowns.
Humans often find themselves driving into the future staring into the rear-view mirror, comparing the future against what we currently do, and usually negatively. Television, for example, was originally described as a great wasteland, the internet seemed to offer no purpose, mobile phones were rejected as unnecessary for anyone except maybe world leaders, and even Microsoft founder Bill Gates was famously quoted back in the very early days of the personal computer that “640K of memory should be enough for anybody.”
Yes, jobs change with time and innovation. The future is always uncertain. But managers and leaders can go a long way in overcoming the fear people feel by providing comfort now, rather than waiting for satisfaction later. The specific message of comfort that managers and leaders should be phrasing at this moment is that humans are infinitely adaptable. We find new ways to do things, and generally these are better ways. Technology changes and we change with it.
Let’s look at matte painters, for example. If you watch movies made before the era of CGI (computer generated images), you will often see amazing landscapes – castles, jungles, 1930s Chicago, or Death Stars hanging in space, which are nothing more than marvelously detailed works of art painted on glass, which the movie camera incorporates into its field of view as it shoots live actors. The end result is that viewers think they are looking at a huge panorama, when in fact it’s just a painting on glass. When CGI came along there was no more need for matte painters, but there was still a need for people with visual and creative talents to build that fantastic imagery. These people simply applied their talents and creativity with new tools.
I was emceeing a conference recently, and I got to chat with the professional photographer, who was taking photos from all types of angles. The conference organizers could have easily set up a few cameras around the room and collected imagery that way. But this photographer was there because he knew what people liked and how best to capture the dynamic conversations of the conference. I asked him how he was able to process so many photos – thousands of them – in order to find the best ones, and his answer was simple. He used an AI app to sort through the thousands of raw images and identify the ones that best suited his visual priorities. He himself was then able to select the best 10% and have them cleaned up and balanced using another AI tool. I asked him the question straight up: “Aren’t these AI tools taking work away from you?” and his answer was “no, they make my job easier by allowing me to get to the best photos faster and turn them around more quickly for the client. This allows me to serve more clients at a time, and business has never been better.
This is what I mean. The matte painter and the photographer story are both true, and they function as stories to deliver comfort to people who in this case may be fearful of AI technologies. I could tell you stories about how accountants can turn to AI to do data entry more quickly and to analyze trends in the marketplace. Both of these are activities that accountants may once have done by hand, but now, with a machine doing these tasks, the accountant is better placed to attain a higher level of value for their client – being a trusted advisor rather than simply a number cruncher.
Sometimes, for all of us, the tedious drudge work – data entry, writing overly-long emails, trying to create PowerPoint decks, attending boring meetings, held us back from more vibrant engaging and valuable work because drudge work still comes disguised as top priority work, at least for that moment.
But this is not an episode about Generative AI. It’s about telling stories that deliver comfort. Comfort comes from the awareness that “yes, you can do it. It’s going to be OK.” When a supplier of a service, like a musician or a caterer, lets the customer know they are on their way, they are giving the customer comfort that the event will happen – and that the event planner will succeed. Similarly, when new technology enters our world, comfort means addressing the future in realistic terms – jobs will change but will change win a way that is more fulfilling and rewarding.
These stories – the musician, the matte painter, and the accountant represent the power of comfort. It gives people a knowledge that things will be OK, and that yes they can do this, and it will be good. Comfort is a fundamental fuel for progress and engagement. We all know how easily people can become fearful and resistant toward change, but it is just as easy for them to tip toward enthusiasm and engagement when they are given the comfort of knowing that it will be OK and that you have their back.
Here’s the most important thing you can do
Schedule time to deliver comfort. Yes, you are busy, yes there are meetings and emails waiting for you and there always will be. But you stand to benefit far more from applying the 80/20 rule to your work. Michael Gerber, author of some great books, including The E-Myth Revisited, said it best: spend 80 percent of your time working in your business (that means the tasks and priorities that constitute your job), but spend 20 percent working ON your business – that means networking, learning, and communicating – actions that don’t get your current work done, but which help ensure future work arrives.
Inside of this 20 percent should be time set aside for delivering those messages of comfort – proactively informing a client that you will be there, or that you are on your way for that meeting or performance, that you have their project well in hand. If you are working on a project, send status updates to give them a sense of where you are on the project, and more importantly that you are working on it. Don’t wait until its finished, to make that big announcement. Remember, clients need comfort now.
That same principle applies to internal clients – your employees – as well. One of the most common causes of failure in a project is when morale drops and people no longer feel connected to the project. Why? Because often the person in charge of the project has the vision of what the outcome will look like,, but they forget to refresh that vision with the team. It’s kind of like a hot air balloon. You have to keep adding doses of warm air regularly to keep it aloft. Same thing with your team supportive messages and updates about progress will do wonders for keeping morale hi an engagement consistent.
In addition to all of these update style messages, there is also the simple idea of saying hello. Just a message to say hi asking how you are, no requests no additional obligations, just keeping in touch. This is a great thing to do with employees but also for contacts in your network, especially on LinkedIn. Everyone expects but each message on LinkedIn will be a sales pitch. It’s a delight to receive a message from a contact that is not a sales pitch but is simply touching base. Or offering a positive comment about a post or article they have added. This keeps the memory of you warm in their hearts and minds, it’s a no obligation message that delivers comfort.
All of these types of messages deliver warmth, they are the first steps toward an experience whose end goal is satisfaction. And the best part? It’s free. Just go out there and deliver it.
My challenge to you is to think about how you can do this. Maybe a daily touch base memo with a contact on LinkedIn, as well as making notes to send status updates and other comfort messages regularly. The most important part is to add this to your calendar so that it becomes a real. It is so easy to forget to do these things as the pressures of the day overcome this valuable 20%. So add it to your calendar make sure to fulfill your promise to yourself to deliver comfort to your internal and external clients. They will recognize you immediately as someone who cares above and beyond the norm, and it will also become part of your legacy.
If you have a comment about this podcast, join the conversation and/or sign up for my newsletter on LinkedIn. My ID there is stevenprentice. Or feel free to drop me a line through the contact form at cooltimelife.com, where you’ll find a full listing of our evergreen CoolTimeLife episodes. If you feel you are getting value from this series, please leave a review, and tell just one person about us, or mention us on social media. And if you want, you can support us on Patreon. Contributions from our listeners allow me and my team to spend more time researching and preparing our podcast series. If that feels fair to you, please visit patreon.com/steveprentice.
Until next time, stay safe, and thanks for listening.
Keywords:
– The importance of comfort in customer service relationships
– How to build trust through proactive communication
– The role of storytelling in delivering comfort and trust
– Managing employee fears during technology adoption
– Comfort strategies for building loyal customers
– How to differentiate comfort vs. satisfaction in customer service
– Effective leadership through managing expectations and delivering comfort
– Creating a positive organizational culture with proactive reassurance
– Storytelling techniques for enhancing customer experience – AI in customer service: addressing fears and creating opportunities
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