I’m in San Francisco for the LinuxWorld conference (watch the Rackspace blog for conference coverage coming soon.) While I am here, I’m staying at a Starwood hotel. I’ve stayed at various Starwood properties in the past, enough that I am part of their loyalty rewards program.

Today it became apparent that the normal checkout time of noon wasn’t going to work - I needed to extend the checkout to 1:00. No big deal, right? I’ve done this a couple of times before, and it’s never been an issue.

I went to the front desk and politely asked if it would be possible to extend my checkout time by an hour. The response I received back has been running through my head ever since.

“As a one time courtesy, I’m going to extend your checkout time.”

Now, on the surface, it looks like this response is perfectly reasonable. I asked for something, and they said yes. However, when it comes to customer service, phrasing makes a huge difference.

“As a one time courtesy …” communicates to the customer that you are going out of your way to help them, and you’d better not ask again. I’d expect this sort of response if I was asking for my room to be comped. I would not expect it when I am asking for a one hour checkout extension in a hotel that is only 70% full.

If I ask for a late checkout in two months, will I get denied? Does Starwood keep a database somewhere of favors that I owe them?

(Obligatory Godfather reference): “I will extend you this courtesy of a late checkout on this, the day of my daughters wedding. One day, I may require a favor from you.”

So, how could the same message be communicated in a way that is more customer-friendly?

“No problem! I’ve gone ahead and changed your checkout time. It’s usually noon, but you can checkout at 1.”

It communicates the same information, but in a way that sounds less like the DMV, and more like a customer-centric hospitality business.

Mark Hurst, author of the wildly entertaining Good Experience Blog, and founder of Creative Good, posted this entry about a recent experience with his bank. The conclusion that Mark draws is spot on.

The reality of business is the customer’s reality. But seeing things from the customer’s perspective, and then acting on it, requires something outside the realm of traditional usability, marketing, branding, and graphic design. It requires listening to, and empathy for, the customer. It requires reaching beyond one’s narrow discipline and learning, sometimes painfully, that things have to change.

This is a trap that even the most gung-ho “customer experience” advocates fall into from time to time. We think of things from our (the company’s) point of view, rather than considering how our customer sees things.

At a previous employer of mine, the company was structured in the Proctor and Gamble model (individual product lines leading a matrixed organization). Everything within the company fell into four different product lines. Which product line a given item lived in was determined by our own internal production process, rather than how the customer would be using it. As such, items that would seem to go together would be owned by completely separate divisions of the company. What’s more, these four divisions were all completely, utterly opposed to sharing resources with any of the other divisions. Four enormous silos, dedicated to making their respective manager look better than the others.

The result of this was all sorts of customer confusion. They would visit our website, and put an item in their cart. They would then want to purchase a complimentary product, but would be unable to find it. Why? Because our org chart said that the product they were looking for lived under someone else, who demanded their own website.

Could you imagine going to dell.com, adding a computer to your cart, and not being able to add a printer because it came out of a different Manager’s P&L? Well, that’s pretty much what we did.

I spent much of my time at that company trying to fight absurd, non-customer friendly decisions such as that one. Eventually, I grew weary of fighting and moved on. I just visited the site, for old times sake … nothing has changed. Depressing.