Last week, one of my cousins and her husband were in town to see a hockey game. He is a Boston Bruins fan (not sure how that happened since he grew up in Eastern Tennessee) so when they realized tickets are cheaper here than in Nashville they decided to make the trip from Knoxville and buy me a ticket too. This was only my second professional hockey game and I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on the sport, but that wasn’t the purpose of the evening. Our seats were about five rows back from the glass in one of the corners, much closer than I would have selected but with a great view of half the rink.

We got there nice and early to watch warmups and soak up all that was on offer in the arena. For me, the arena offered way too much. Mainly, it was too loud. This may have been due to our seat location relative to the direction of the speakers, but you shouldn’t have to raise your voice over artificial noise to have a conversation with the person sitting next to you at a sporting event, especially one that hasn’t even started yet. Even more frustrating was how they pumped music through the speakers any time the puck wasn’t in play during the game itself. For most of my audience that has not been to many hockey games, this would be like music blaring between every pitch at a baseball game or between plays at a football game. It completely destroyed the rhythm of the spectacle. Is the average attention span really that short now?

Sitting there through the third period (the outcome was sealed by then with the home team dominant), I thought some more about how my experience was hampered by the music preventing me feeling the rhythm on the ice. Just a few moments’ quiet would have done so much to add to the atmosphere, if only to increase the tension before a face-off.

There are not many parallels between the experience at a hockey game and the client experience in working with our law firm. I’m not going to try to force a connection. Just let my experience be a reminder for you as well as for me—as a business owner you must always focus on the client experience. How you make your customers feel is often more important than even the results they achieve from using your products or services when they need your products or services again.