What Is White-Glove Service In Customer Service?
Perhaps one of the greatest victims of the global digital revolution, customer service remains a top concern for customers across the business spectrum. Spend five minutes watching any series of commercials, and you’ll probably hear a business touting its customer satisfaction accolades.
Why do they do this? Because they want potential customers to know that they take providing excellent customer service seriously.
How Does White-Glove Service Benefit Your Business?
A happy customer will tell two or three others about their experience, but an unhappy customer will tell nine or more. What does this mean for your sustained success? It means that you cannot afford to have consistently bad reviews. Customer satisfaction will undoubtedly help your business; however, customer dissatisfaction will sink you.
Granted, it is important to provide high-quality products, find new customers, and continue to innovate your product. This is often referred to as the chase. After the chase, however, it is equally important to ensure your customers know that they still matter to you. Always, the customer needs to know you’re paying them special attention.
One way you can accomplish this is by providing top-of-the-line customer service, also referred to as white-glove Service. What does white-glove Service mean, you ask? Well, that is what we are here to discuss, in case our title did not give it away!
White-Glove Service Ensures a Great Customer Experience
Customer experience can make or break a company. Some of the most common customer complaints, regardless of how much they love their product, revolve around the customer service they receive before, during, and after the purchase. Customer care begins from the first moment a customer walks in your doors or visits your website.
Much attention is often given to these first crucial moments. Most businesses understand the importance of ensuring new customers are greeted, made to feel welcome, given the attention they need, and assisted with their questions or concerns in real-time. Equally as important is ensuring that customer care continues after the sale.
People work hard for their money, and when they choose to spend it with you, they deserve white-glove service. So what is white-glove service, and how can you ensure your company from the top down both provide it and prioritize it?
White-Glove Service Explained
The expression white-glove Service is rooted in the tradition of the white-gloves butlers wear when providing services to their employers. These white gloves have become an immediately recognizable sign of luxury and service. Another notable usage of white gloves is in the military.
Service members often wear white gloves with dress uniforms like those worn by the Marines standing guard at the White House or Air Force One. Usually, these uniforms are only worn for the most important events, such as funerals for those who die in service and visits with high-ranking officers or politicians.
white-gloves are a universal sign of reverence, respect, and service. These white gloves are kept spotless and untarnished to not diminish the courtesy and respect they are intended to provide. This expression’s significance helps explain its use to describe customer service that demonstrates to your clients that they matter to you both before and after spending their money.
White-Glove Service In Action
You may be asking yourself how to implement white-glove treatment and ensure it becomes engrained in your company’s traditions and culture. Never fear! We’re here to help you guide down that road. Here’s a sneak peek: It All Starts With You.
The old adage The Buck Stops Here is never truer when it comes to both the failures and successes of your company. As a leader in your company, you understand that the weight of success rests largely on your shoulders and that weight motivates you to constantly strive towards excellence. Much like an athlete, you realize that this weight leads to strength. Your employees will understand the importance of providing white-glove customer service when it becomes a top mission of your company’s leadership.
Successful companies that deliver white-glove customer service often become known for that service more than what they offer. When customers visit your business, they need to feel welcomed by your employees. If they walk in your door and your employees make them feel like they are a burden, this will leave a bad taste in their mouths. When they have questions about your products, your employees need to have the skills, expertise, and knowledge to answer them confidently. If not, the customer will feel like they may be receiving inaccurate information, or worse, like their question was never answered.
After purchasing your product, customers need to know that they can depend on you to help them when they have issues, problems, or concerns. If they feel abandoned, they are less likely to give you their business again. Worse, they are less likely to recommend your company to their friends and family. Customers who feel abandoned are also more likely to take the time to leave bad reviews of your product and company on consumer websites.
Feelings of abandonment can also occur inadvertently on the part of both you and your company. Many customers will visit your business or webpage, purchase your product, and never have a question, an issue, or a concern. Because of this, they will have no need to contact you. Still, you cannot allow too much time to pass without reengaging with them.
One great way to facilitate consistent, non-needy engagement with customers is through social media applications. Using platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook can be a great way to build customer relationships and even a sense of community around your business. It doesn’t have to be eCommerce. Using the internet to help your business doesn’t require credit cards or customer data collection. Think of social media initiatives as using automation to exceed customer expectations, letting them know you care about your app by sending notifications about special product deals or services.
These gestures can go a long way in demonstrating your company’s commitment to providing them with white-glove customer service. The best way to describe this type of service is by calling it proactive instead of reactive customer service.
Proactive Service vs. Reactive Service
Ask anybody. They’ll tell you that the difference between a company that anticipates your needs and a company that reacts to your needs is substantial. It is important to provide high-quality white-glove customer service when responding to a customer’s issue. Still, being proactive and getting ahead of customer issues can leave such a great impression that your customers will be almost guaranteed to stick around.
This concept has been practiced for many years by law enforcement agencies. Instead of reacting to crime when it occurs, many law enforcement agencies employ crime prevention tactics to stop a crime from ever occurring, subsequently preventing victimization. Preventing crime is far more beneficial than providing justice for a crime. This same concept of crime prevention by law enforcement can be used in your business, which we will call for the sake of this article Complaint Prevention.
Aside from leaving your customers in awe of your dedication to providing them with second-to-none white-glove customer service, being proactive about potential problems and issues will build customer retention and loyalty, workplace culture, and enhance your core mission and principles.
How To Make Customer Service What You Do Best
The slogan for North Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance is Helping You Is What We Do Best. One would think that a company that offers insurance products would want to be known for the cost of their insurance premiums and how they handle claims. We’re sure those things are incredibly significant to this company. However, the message they want to send to their current and potential clients highlights the service they will receive, not the product.
You can find examples of this amongst companies from nearly every industry in America and worldwide. As made evident by their commercials, many companies see it as an important aspect of competition. They understand that, for customers, choosing who to do business with goes beyond the product and deeper into the realm of service.
We encourage you to use Farm Bureau’s slogan as an example of how including white-glove customer service into your company’s mission is paramount to your future success. Make providing this service what you do best, and your success and the quality of your products will match it.
Don’t Be That Company
We encourage you, no, we urge you, to be the company that customers know will provide quick, responsive, personal, and professional service whenever a need arises. That’ll put you well on your way to providing the white-glove customer service experience your customers deserve.
Have you ever called to speak with someone at a business about a problem you are having with their product or service? Sure you have because all of us are consumers even if we are producers also.
Maybe you have called to speak with your mobile cellular service provider about a hardware problem, your internet provider about speed delays, or your satellite television provider about connectivity issues. And when you have called to speak with someone about these problems, you stay on hold for a lifetime, you finally get to someone, and it turns out they can’t help you. So, you get transferred to a brand new queue.
Ever been there? We have! It is frustrating and usually leads to us doing a Google search of their competitors and what they offer. Why? Because we feel unimportant and neglected. Sometimes, even if our problem cannot be resolved, we are satisfied as long as we feel heard and helped. If we feel neglected and abandoned, even if our issue is resolved, we dread the day we may ever need help again.
Where To Smartsource Your Service
At Awesome CX, we specialize in providing the white-glove Customer Service experience that your customers deserve. When they experience exceptional service, they will undoubtedly remain a loyal customer for years to come.
If providing back-end customer service solutions has become an identifiable weakness in your organization, outsourcing that component to us could be beneficial in many ways. Our specialty is helping you boost customer retention and satisfaction. By smartsourcing, you give yourself the room you need to innovate and amplify your why.
Contact us today to learn how we can be partners in instituting a white-glove Customer Service across all of your storefronts, both physical and digital!
Sources:
15 Statistics That Should Change the Business World – But Haven’t | Beyond Philosophy
The 7 Most Common Customer Complaints and How to Respond | ReturnCustomer
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