Last month, my lovely bride and I moved.  When you move into a new home, you have a concentrated opportunity to experience service scenarios.  During the first month at your new location, you will interact with a wide variety of organizations as you arrange your phone, utilities, trash collection, yard maintenance, and the like.  You will discover new purveyors for groceries, mail, courier, fitness, car repair, and the myriad of other daily needs.  You will also discover that many individuals and businesses confuse courteous client interactions with customer service excellence. 

Yes, you cannot achieve service excellence without being courteous to your customers, but that is hardly enough on which to build a long term relationship.  It would be like bringing a ball, bat, and glove to a baseball diamond and expecting to be a great player.  There is so much more that must be done.  Here are four simple secrets to service excellence for the long term:

Return phone calls promptly with value.  I get that no one answers the phone anymore.  I don’t like it as a customer, but I also understand that small businesses are often owner/operators who are trying to balance business development with service delivery.  As a customer I am resigned to leaving a voice mail on first contact.  However, waiting more than 24 hours for a return call is disappointing.  If you cannot return calls within 24 hours, you are not even offering good customer service, let alone service excellence.

One of my biggest pet peeves is what I refer to as the “non-productive interaction.”  This is when someone calls me back and gets my voice mail and simply “tags” me.  You know, the whole “looks like we are playing phone tag.”  I hate that game.  When you leave a message for a customer, provide some value.  Here are some ways to add value on phone messages or emails:

• Answer their initial question
• Provide them with a specific time that you will be available to talk to them
• Promise to call back at a specific time so they can be available
• Direct them to other resources (like a website or Facebook page) that may provide them with the answers they are looking for

Do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it.  Do I really need to list this one?  Based on my experiences, yes.  At its most distilled level, customer service is this.  If you do not keep your service promise to a customer, which is to do what you said you would do when you said you would do it, then you have failed to provide service excellence.

Manage customer expectations then exceed them on occasion.  Customer service comes in three varieties:

Promise and under deliver.  This means you are either over-promising or you are incompetent.  Neither represents service excellence and neither will create a long term relationship

Promise and deliver.  This means you are effectively managing the client’s expectations and are competently meeting them.  It also means that you are not exciting your customer.  It is hard to create long term loyalty if you never excite your customer.

Promise and over deliver.  If you are doing this all the time you are either under promising (which makes you susceptible to competitors who promise more) or you are likely to create a new client expectation that may be hard to meet long term.

I recommend that you create client expectations that you can comfortably deliver every time, and then occasionally blow them away with something special.  By doing so, your client will appreciate those special touches without growing to expect them at each transaction.  You want to be measured by your ability to do the fundamentals and appreciated by the extra effort you give to create long term customer relationships, which leads to…

Focus on the client’s future needs, not the current transaction.  As a service provider, approach a new client like you are dating.  If the first transaction goes well, have a strategy for getting the next date.  What you want is for your client to change their status from “single” to “in a relationship.”  First dates are awkward, and your client doesn’t want to have to keep playing the field for your services.  Ask your client for feedback based on the first transaction, and discuss how and when they would like their next service.  By doing this, you reduce the likelihood that the customer will continue to shop around for other service providers.

If a company provides value to me every time we interact, do what they say they will do when they say they will do it, meets my expectations every time, occasionally does something more than expected, and plans our next transaction after each interaction – all while being courteous – now we have the makings of a long term, service excellence relationship.