When chef and provocateur Anthony Bourdain visited Seattle’s Pike Place neighborhood not long ago, he praised our local restaurateurs’ unwillingness to turn out lowest common denominator, tourist-trappish junk. “You see it over and over in this town,” he said, “the food being much, much better than it has to be.”
I would argue that Bourdain is on to something, something that extends far beyond the food scene.  Making it “better than it has to be” is one of the ultimate secrets of creating a sustainable customer experience, regardless of your line of work (and regardless of geography). Not just in delights for foodies and other hungry folks.  But in the rest of what makes life great for customers–and sustainably profitable for businesses.
While this is hardly Seattle-exclusive, you can find extraordinary examples here without even breaking a sweat:
Nordstrom's "better than it has to be" customer experience has served it well
Nordstrom’s “better than it has to be” customer experience has long served it well. Photo on right © Micah Solomon; historical photo courtesy Nordstrom
  • Nordstrom’s showroom and omnichannel innovations including–to give just a simple example–Nordstrom’s implementation of handheld POS (point of sale) functionality to eliminate register lines. Not to mention Nordstrom’s new “Silver Box” program that allows those of us who hate to shop to stay at home while your personal shopper hand-selects clothes she thinks will be perfect for you and mails them to you, in your size and preferred colors, essentially “on approval.”
  • The unending stream of customer experience innovations at Starbucks, whose capstone, perhaps, is the new Willy Wonka-esque Roastery and Tasting Room.
  • The endless customer experience overacheivement at Amazon.com, from frustration-free packaging to delivery so fast it feels like your order arrives before you even placed it. (This may not be an exaggeration for much longer,  if Amazon’s application for an “anticipatory shopping” patent turns out to be for real).
  • And how about Plugable Technologies, a small, scrappy manufacturer of USB, Bluetooth, and power-related devices (routers, splitters–the kind of essential stuff for the desktop or office that really messes you up if it doesn’t work reliably or fails to be compatible with your latest OS update).
Plugable designs their devices from the ground up, and then they back their devices up by supporting their users.
They don’t outsource this customer support.  They don’t insource it with poorly paid and barely technically competent entry level employees.  Nope, they have their actual engineers—the people who build and repair their products–manning the support emails. (They’ve chosen email for support because it allows quick exchange of links, log files, and other technical details that can’t be shared by phone).   If you contact Plugable’s technicians in a state of confusion, they’ll steer you straight.If you discover a bug or incompatibility, they get it fixed or publish a bulletin that provides a workaround. As only the folks who design and service the products really could.
Plugable has build a customer experience, a customer support model, that is better than it has to be.  And they’re thriving.
They’re hardly the only ones, and success stories like Plugable’s–the phenomenon of “better than it has to be” businesses doing better on the bottom line–is hardly geography-specific.  Wherever you’re located, wherever you do business, it’s a powerful mode of operation.