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Let’s assume you are the director of a hotel group. (Stick with it.) In one of them, an experienced employee, a facilities engineer, stands on a ladder and changes a light bulb. While he was doing this, two children and their mother, looking quite haggard, attempt to enter through the side entrance. All three of them are wearing bathrobes, but they’re still a little dripping from their time at the beach, and sand occasionally falls from their flip-flops and hair.
When the maintenance engineer notices them, he comes down from the ladder and walks over, opening the door for them so they do not have to proceed messing with them, and greets them nicely as well. Asking about their time on the beach, he walks with them to the elevator and even presses the button for the floor they are going to, because no one has a free hand except the children, who don’t have one and are too young (read: short) to achieve it.
When I present this scenario in customer service training sessions I lead, participants tell me they think this response is “pretty good, maybe even excellent.” But that is the problem Is, as participants of my customer service training noticed, a answer, what I might call it reactive customer service. This implies that it is lacking in one respect: The customer needed to ask for service — in this case, she asked for it with a visible gesture of fiddling with the handle of the side door — and only when she did so did the worker react.
Of course this level of service is higher than NO service, what would occur if a customer asked for something and was ignored, rejected or responded reluctantly. Still, service can go one notch higher, which I call anticipatory customer service.
Anticipatory customer service directly triggers emotions that can most certainly translate into customer loyalty; gets to the point faster and more directly than reactive customer service ever could.
So let’s run the scenario again. A maintenance engineer is standing on a ladder changing a light bulb, and the mother and children are approaching the side entrance (clear glass). In this version of the script even earlier Mom has a probability to start out playing with the doorknob, the maintenance man is already opening the door and inviting the guests inside. There is no effort required for guests, and they are on the customer side of what I might call a waiting customer job. The difference between these two scenarios is only a few seconds. However, the second version, in which the engineer steps down from the ladder and actively approaches the door, is the version that can attract visitors again and again because it touched their hearts in a small but significant way.
It can be unfair to say that proactive customer service does not cost greater than being responsive, regardless that the cost is not visible. To do this requires training, inspiration and often staffing. So why put in so much work to turn into an organization that consistently outperforms its customers? One of the few competitive benefits left in the marketplace is the ability to raise yourself to the highest level of customer service, satisfying desires or needs that customers have not even asked for or asked for yet.
Before we go further, Why Wouldn’t customers ask for something they need that will be helpful to them, or ask a query whose answer can be vital to them? Here are the foremost reasons:
First, they don’t need to cause trouble. I know if you’re employed with demanding clients all day long you will have a hard time believing me on this, but there are some clients who don’t need to appear demanding, don’t need to make a fuss, or who are naturally embarrassed in public places.
Second, they might not know enough about what you possibly can offer to ask for the right thing. This could also be resulting from a lack of market research or, more often, because You they are experts in your offering and exceptions that will be made individually, but they simply aren’t.
The third, more disturbing reason is that they are dissatisfied enough to put in writing you off for future employment, knowing that in most markets as of late it is very easy to change brands if they need to seek higher service elsewhere.
To turn into an organization that successfully delivers anticipatory customer service requires investment, human and perhaps financial. It might be helpful to spotlight the characteristics of empathy when developing and implementing recruitment criteria. It might be much more helpful if you, like The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, encourage an “antennas off” approach where the entire team gets used to noticing things that will be hard to see if they were all the time given a lot of time to work on with its functionalities. tasks and ultimately also requires appropriate staff. One person generally cannot do the work of two in a predictable manner, although excellent processes and technology support can get you closer.
Perhaps most significantly, predictable customer service will move your organization out of the dangerous and unprofitable commodity zone where customers view your organization as interchangeable with your competitors. This is especially beneficial in today’s marketplace because it is one of the few competitive benefits available to many businesses. The truth is that if you have a unique product or service offering, you have one other method to avoid commoditization. However, most of our firms and offers are not as special as we think. Or that uniqueness is not visible to customers, akin to anticipatory customer service. With predictable customer service, you show them your true colours – and it’s really vibrant and shiny.