Most of us think about customer experience as something that begins once someone becomes a customer.
Onboarding.
Delivery.
Follow-up.
You know – the part where the actual work happens.
But people decide about you well before that. Often on a single phone call, before they’ve spent a dollar or seen your face.
I learned this in the most ordinary way possible: trying to find an orthodontist for my youngest son.
You’re Being Read Before You’re Hired
My first attempt at reaching out wasn’t even a call, really. My older son’s orthodontist had simply stopped answering the phone.
I left messages. Nobody called back. After enough of that, I stopped trying and started looking for someone new.
I found a practice on Google about fifteen minutes out – beautiful website; everything about it suggested a thriving business. I dialed the listed number, but the line wasn’t in service.
That’s a signal too… and not one anybody meant to send.
So I called an office in town. The receptionist asked a few qualifying questions in a tone that made it clear she’d asked them several hundred times before. She put me on hold to check something, and when she came back on the line, she asked what insurance we had. I told her. She let me know we were out-of-network, that this would be cash, and that I should make sure I could cover it before we came in.
None of that was unkind.
None of it was inaccurate.
But it was delivered with a bit of an edge to it.
I already knew orthodontics might not be covered. That wasn’t new news; but something about how that policy read arrived left me feeling like I’d been asked to prove I belonged before I’d even walked through the door.
Back to the drawing board.
The third call was fifteen minutes in the other direction. The woman who answered was smiling (because yes, you can hear it in the tone of voice), and she asked the same qualifying questions the second receptionist had asked. But then she kept going.
She told me about the practice.
That it was a family business.
How they worked, what they believed about the work, what the first appointment would actually involve.
When she got to insurance, she said the same thing the other receptionist had said – we might be out of network – and then she said something the other one hadn’t. She informed me that if we were, they’d work with us, either through payment plans or through something that fit an actual budget.
She asked us to come a few minutes early, because they try hard to stay on schedule and they don’t want to waste anyone’s time.
It was eight minutes on the phone, but I booked the consult before I hung up.
The Same Information, Delivered Differently
It would be easy to read that as a story about tone. One receptionist was warm, one wasn’t; be the warm one. That’s the version of this story most people would tell.
But tone isn’t what separated those two calls, and I think the tone reading is why so much customer service training doesn’t work.
You can’t fix a structural problem by asking someone to sound friendlier.
Here’s what actually happened: the second receptionist gave me accurate information. The third gave me accurate information plus everything I didn’t know to ask for.
I didn’t know to ask whether they offered payment plans. It hadn’t occurred to me that was a thing an orthodontist might do.
I didn’t know to ask what would happen at the first appointment, or whether arriving early mattered. I would have shown up on time and been mildly annoyed to wait.
She answered questions I hadn’t formed yet. That’s the whole difference.
And the reason it lands so hard is that not knowing is what makes people anxious.
The unknown is what hurts us.
When someone hands you information you didn’t know to ask for, they haven’t just been pleasant – they’ve removed something you were quietly carrying.
That’s not a personality trait. It’s a service design decision.
The Other Side of the Desk
Here’s the part I want to be careful about, because the easy version of this story makes the second receptionist the villain, and I don’t think that’s fair or true.
I knew nothing about her day. I don’t know how many calls she’d taken, what she was managing, whether anyone had ever trained her on the insurance conversation, or whether she had anything to offer beyond what she gave me.
That last one matters most.
She may not have had a payment plan to mention. That practice may have had no such policy – or had one and never told her. She delivered accurate information flatly because accurate information was the entire inventory she’d been handed.
You cannot proactively share what you don’t have.
So the failure in that call probably wasn’t hers. It was upstream. Somebody built a front desk without asking what it feels like to be the person calling it; a parent doing math in their head, hoping this doesn’t turn into a number they can’t manage, already worn down from an office that stopped answering the phone.
Nobody walked that mile, so nobody thought to give her something to say.
The third practice had. Whether they’d done it deliberately or arrived at it by instinct, someone there had thought through what a first-time caller is actually feeling and equipped the person answering the phone to meet it.
Before They’re a Customer
A week after the call, an envelope came. Intake forms, which I expected, and also a pamphlet about how the practice works and what they believe. There was also a reminder card for my wallet. A business card in case I wanted to refer someone.
Then a text reminder.
Then a calendar invite by email.
Now realize something: I still hadn’t set foot in the building.
Every one of those touchpoints was answering the same unspoken question: what will it be like to deal with these people?
By the time I walked in, I already knew. They’d told me a dozen small ways.
That’s the part worth sitting with. The experience had already happened. The appointment was just confirmation.
What This Costs to Fix
Honestly? Almost nothing, which is the frustrating part.
Nobody in that third office was performing. There was no script that would survive being read aloud, no service philosophy on a laminated card. Someone had simply asked what the person on the other end of the line didn’t yet know, and then made sure the answers were available to whoever picked up.
That’s a twenty-minute conversation and a one-page document. It’s not a budget item.
And I’d extend the same grace to the practice with the disconnected number. Nobody chose that. Somebody changed providers, or a listing went stale, and no one thought to check what a stranger sees when they look for you. The gap between what you think you’re presenting and what’s actually reaching people is where most of this lives.
The Signal Your Customer Experience Is Sending
Here is the reality: you’re sending a customer experience signal either way.
Every touchpoint – the phone, the form, the email, the wait, the tone of the person who answers – tells someone what it’s going to be like to work with you. They’re reading the signal whether or not you meant to write it.
The question isn’t whether you’re communicating. You are, constantly, in ways you’re not tracking.
The question is whether the signal you’re sending is the one you’d choose.
So the useful move isn’t to resolve to communicate better. It’s to find out what’s actually being read.
Go through your own front door as a stranger.
- Look yourself up the way someone who’s never heard of you would.
- Call your own number.
- Fill out your own form.
- Send yourself the inquiry and sit in the gap before the reply comes, and notice how long that gap actually is.
And if you can’t see your own thing clearly (most of us can’t), ask someone who owes you no kindness to do it and tell you the truth.
Then sit with the question the third receptionist was quietly answering the whole time: What does this person need to know that they don’t know to ask?
Not what do I need them to know.
Instead, what are they carrying that I could set down for them?
You probably already have the answer. Most owners do. The information exists – in your head, in a policy nobody ever wrote down, in the thing you explain beautifully on a discovery call, and nowhere else.
The gap is almost never that you don’t have it.
It’s that it isn’t reaching anyone until after they need it.
