Director of First Impressions?

Director of First Impressions? What is this boy on about? Has he lost his marbles?

Well, no, frankly! First impressions last (last impressions last, too but that's a different story!). And I know all this stuff about "it takes six seconds to make a first impression" is a bit of a cliché, but is it? Really?

When you think about the judgements you make in life, when you first meet someone, look for the first time at a web page, go into a shop or an office for the first time, I reckon six seconds is about right. And that first impression sticks. It's not so easy to change your mind, is it?

At Shopper Anonymous, we bang on about this stuff all the time. 'Cos it's really important! It's a key part of delivering great customer service. There may be a fantastic product or service lurking in that business, served up by brilliant, warm and helpful people, but if I don't like the first impression, I will probably not enter the business and I will never find out.

And where does the first impression start? In your advertising? In your out of hours phone message? On your website? At the office door? Well, it's surely all of these. We've got some fantastic (anonymised!) examples of rotten first impressions created by out of hours messages in significant businesses, because they didn't take care of first impressions. It's fun to see the shock on people's faces when we play back some of these at seminars. Check yours!

So what is the Director of First Impressions? Clearly it's a fictitional job title but why not have a person in your business who takes responsibility for worrying about all this stuff and checking it on a regular basis. As we say at Shopper Anonymous, "Test your own business", "Test your own business", "Test your own business"!

I was at a networking event recently and was discussing this very point with an MD of a reasonably sized business in Tunbridge Wells. He seemed to get it and when I met him again a few weeks later, he made a beeline for me and told me how much he'd changed in his business - at the office door, car park, on the web site, etc., just by thinking about being the Director of First Impressions. It really, really works!

Who is your Director of First Impressions?

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