I had two very different experiences yesterday with two very different-sized companies.
A flight delay made me miss my connection by ten minutes while traveling home. The gate agent told me I had to wait five hours for the next one. American Airlines is a huge company dealing with thousands of customers every day. And they behaved like it. Nobody apologized. Nobody offered to do anything other than what was required of them. Nobody seemed to care. They barely looked up from their screens.
While I was waiting, I got a call from a woman in the Colgate University bookstore. She told me they were no longer carrying the item I’d ordered and apologized—like a real person, not as a policy. She’d noticed that I’d picked overnight shipping and figured it must have been important. She wanted to explain some options that were close replacements so they could still package them up in time to ship them overnight.
She was just one person doing something relatively simple—but the caring made all the difference.
So many of us—students, private counselors and colleges—are trying to stand out. It’s easy to think that spending time and money on a new website, marketing campaign, or a third round of SAT prep is going to help you get there. But that’s all just window dressing. It’s the little things that will matter, like your character, how you treat people, and whether or not you actually apologize and mean it when you mess up.
Get those things right over and over again, not as a strategy or policy, but because you actually mean it, and you’ll stand out.