The Secret to Providing A World Class Customer Service

The idea of providing world-class customer service is no foreign to people in the business world. Many organizations even have laid down certain policies and regulations to make sure their customers are valued and prioritized by the employees.

To be able to feel important and valued by a customer is what determines the level of customer service that is provided to them.

The prestige or the fame gained by the company highly depends upon the kind of service it provides its customers with.

Customer satisfaction is one of the most important pillars which beholds the reputation of an organization. The happier your customers, the higher the reputation.

That is so because nearly 87% of the population spreads the word about their experience with any kind of company or service irrespective if it was good or bad.

Bonding with the customer, establishing a relationship with him, as many might call it a strategy is a shift that would pierce through the personal lives of the people and the community as a whole and which in turn would provide the business with higher sales, morale and brand loyalty.

Thus, making the price irrelevant.

Making the price irrelevant doesn’t mean that you’ll raise the price of the commodity or service by twice and not worry about losing a customer or raising the price by 25% and worry about losing a customer.

It means that you will create such bonds and a healthy relationship with your customer that the next time they go shopping for a service or whatsoever, their first choice will be you.

Regardless of how much it may cost, they will rather purchase things from because they’d have a sufficient amount of trust in you and your service so much so that they are ready to pay any price as long as they acquire the service from you.

Also, the great advantage of this situation is that your customer doesn’t know the price that your competition charges of the service that you provide them with, so you can charge them with anything as long as the amount is not unjust and fair to the service.

Don’t you think in a world of cut-throat competition, your rival company as well would be trying to win over your customers, hence, gaining more profit? Wouldn’t your rival company be delivering the same services as you?

To win over customers, you have to have some secret tools to make your customers loyal to yourself because brand loyalty plays a major role in the success of a business.

That said, let’s closely examine the secrets of proving world-class services.

Let’s look at some of the examples to understand better what we mean when we say ‘the secret” to providing world-class service.

What according to you would be a secret service from the list of given examples?

• Asking your client how their day went.
• Being courteous by asking your customer anything to eat or drink.
• Sending a bouquet to all your female clients on valentine’s day.
• Bringing your client their favorite drink whenever they visit you.

If you answered as 1 and 4, then you’re correct. In both the correct answers, there’s one thing in common. Both the answers portray the idea of going a little out of way than the traditional mindset while conversing with or treating the clients.

The secret

There is that! The Secret. The secret to providing the clients with the best in world-class services is adding a pinch of personal touch to it. While everyone likes to do the business the traditional way and going out of it considered incoherent and absurd, that is not the case.

This mindset emerged from the perspective of the people into business alone.

But a survey shows that creating relationships with the customers besides already providing them with the best services, is more likely to make the customers come-back, in short, increasing brand loyalty.

The idea to provide the secret service which would be the best world-class is to personalizing the equation a little bit.

Asking them time and again about any personal information that you might have about them.

By now, you must be wondering how would you know about the personal side of their life. Because keeping a questionnaire in front of them asking for details about their personal life would freak them out and away.

And honestly, regardless of the modern mentality, it’ll be considered out of line.

After all, you were supposed to do business with them and not try to know about their personal life.

Building these kinds of relationships with your customers or clients takes time and effort. You cannot ask them to tell you about their family or personal business unless they are very comfortable or willing to tell you that.

And this comfort could only be achieved by enabling them to trust you.

By establishing a relationship with the customer, what we mean is, just knowing his name or maybe age is not enough. It would not be called a relationship until you know about two or more things out of their Family, Recreation, Occupation, or Dreams.

Supposedly, a customer refused you to call them while you were scheduling their next call with you for some business by telling you that they had some trip up on their schedule.

So, the next time you communicate with them, instead of blandly greeting them with a plain ‘Hello’, you could ask about how their trip went.

That just adds the amount of personal touch required.

Alternatively, to know about their personal preferences to assist them the next time they visit, your employees can try and pick up on the small things and remember them as to what they are doing while in-store.

So, the next time they come you may surprise them by already knowing their preferences and taking the required steps in the direction to whatever service is required.

This is what we call ‘Silent Cues and Visual Triggers’, the ability to pick up and communicate silently, either through eye contact or hand and body gestures.

Many restaurants and public centers have their own policies and regulations of their working method which are quite interesting so to say.

They make use of the technique ‘silent cues and visual triggers’ to let any employee know as to what client they are serving if he’s just a normal customer or a VIP.

For example, many restaurants have multicolored menus to let the employees know, since how long is the person a customer of the restaurant and what kind of service should be provided to him/her.

Let’s say, the blue colored menu card would be for a customer who is just 6 months old and would be like a normal menu card.

On the other hand, the yellow card can be for old customers who might have been with the restaurant for a good, long time and their menu card would contain all the special recommendations by the chef and would be provided with high-quality service.

The same type of services was also seen in laundry stores where multicolored bags depicted the type of customer they were and what kind of quality services shall be delivered to them.

Secret service can also be rendered to them in many other ways such as phone-calling or e-mailing them to show that you are interested more than in just their business.

You can also send cards or gifts on occasions such as their birthday or anniversaries and let them know that you care for and value them.

Many companies have a policy where their employees are supposed to establish relationships with the customers by sending them a small gift every month.

They are paid $25 extra for employees to be able to oblige their customers with just something simple but special.

Some big organizations even offer holiday gifts/VIP appreciation gifts to their customers no matter if they are single or married or have kids because work-pressure is the same on all of them and are provided with such a service to maintain their life-balance.

Additionally, it is mandatory to know that secret service should not cause a burden on the company. It should have absolutely no impact on the organization.

• Secret service systems should be free or low in cost.
• These should be simple to execute.
• They should have zero impact on productivity or efficiency
• These should have an immediate impact on customers.

Exceeding people’s expectations about service and therefore, creating brand loyalty is what world-class customer service is.

The basic idea behind it is to overthrow the conventional business mentality and entirely transform the experience of the customers as well as the employee.

Now here, an employee’s experience isn’t related to the customer directly but when you give it a closer look, the pieces fall into its place.

For employees, the kind of service they deliver to the customer mainly depends on two things.

1. The first one happens to be their experience with the services themselves.

An employee, who doesn’t get kind of pay where he/she can fulfill all his/her needs or who also has gone to a five-star hotel or got an expensive haircut, how can one expect him to deliver the utmost satisfactory customer service.

He can’t relate to the person or he cannot put himself in the shoes of the customer because he doesn’t know what it feels to be entirely satisfied, valued, or prioritized.

2. The second refers to their prior experiences. While you may know the type of organization they worked at but you definitely might not have even a single clue as to what they were taught about treating the customers.

It might as well have been something about not behaving with the customers properly or not treating them as they should be. For example, they could have been told things like customers pose some threat or mentioned as someone who should always be kept an eye on.

It, therefore, becomes very important to treat your employees the way you would want your customers to be treated.

Because ultimately, it’s your employees who will bond with the customer and provide them with simply the best service.

You might have some part to play in this whole bonding with the customer’s things but at last, the stage will be theirs. So, think wisely and act accordingly.

Secret service is a great and very effective strategy to win over your customers easily and differentiate and distance yourself from your competitors.

It follows the rule, “The Better the Experience, The Less Price Becomes An Issue”.