Anticipatory customer service is the master skill, behavior, and attitude that distinguishes the kind of service that actually creates customer loyalty.
Why would this be? Well, partly because it’s difficult enough that if you succeed in pulling it off, you’ll leave your competition in the dust.
Straightforward, satisfactory customer service is reactive: a customer asks for something and you give provide it for them on time, without defects, and in a friendly manner.
In other words, here are the elements you need for satisfactory customer service:
1. A defect-free product or service
2. Delivered on time
3. …by friendly people
4. With the support of a customer service recovery framework for when things go wrong.
Now, getting this far isn’t easy. (Right now, for instance, “on time” is very hard to manage with the supply chain issues.) So I applaud you if you’re there. But I also will warn you that it may not be enough to build customer engagement and loyalty.
A merely satisfied customer can be absolutely content with you and still have a wandering eye, because it’s a reasonable bet that your competitors are able to supply satisfactory service about as well as you do—maybe a little better, maybe a little worse, but in the ballpark—so what’s the point, to a customer, of limiting themselves to one supplier?
To move them into the customer loyalty category you need something else: anticipatory customer service. that I assure you your competitors aren’t going to get around to offering, and if you start doing it, you’ll build the all-important loyal customers who will sustain your business for years. (Why are loyal customers so essential? They’re less price sensitive. They’re more forgiving of your minor foibles. They’re more willing to consider your brand extensions. And they’re more likely to sing your praises, online and off.)
Anticipatory customer service is going where the puck is headed before the puck gets there. It’s giving the customer what they want
…before they ask for it
… even if they never ask for it
(Customers sometimes don’t ask for what they truly desire or what would benefit them the most because they don’t know they’d benefit from it, or they don’t know it’s a possibility, or even—I know this sounds far-fetched—they don’t want to be a bother or aren’t an assertive person in public.)
Here is one of my all-time favorite examples of anticipatory customer service:
What a housekeeping employee did for my family at Montage Palmetto Bluff, a Forbes Five Star hotel and resort near Savannah, Georgia on the banks of the May River in South Carolina, is one of the loveliest examples of “wow” customer service that I’ve encountered. The employee, Tonya, works as a house attendant, the housekeeping department position formerly known as “houseman.”
Photo credit: Getty
Tonya pulled up outside our cottage on the sprawling Palmetto Bluff campus in her golf cart, bringing supplies such as bottled water, towels, and sheets for the housekeepers working inside. Three Solomons—my young son and his young-at-heart parents—were out front of the cottage as our son struggled to stay vertical on the bicycle we had borrowed from the Inn.
Tonya saw my son teetering atop a bike that he wasn’t ready to handle and instantly tuned in to the trouble we were having. She announced, “Your boy needs a bike with wheels,” by which she meant training wheels, and returned in five minutes bringing us a bike newly equipped with training wheels, accompanied by Angella, a manager from Palmetto Bluff’s recreation department, whom Tonya had brought with her to ensure that our son got off to a successful start.
This act of wow customer service enhanced the remainder of our time at The Inn at Palmetto Bluff by allowing our son, on his now appropriately equipped bicycle, to range all over the gorgeous trails of the property. It was, if not life-changing, at least vacation-changing.
Tonya didn’t just make an extra effort. She made the right extra effort. She saw beyond her House Attendant function, making use of her innate knowledge of guests, and of kids, to address what our son needed that we hadn’t even recognized ourselves. She also stepped outside of her reporting area (housekeeping) to bring in help from another department (Angella from recreation) to make sure we got on track.
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How to get started offering anticipatory customer service at your organization:
1. Make it part of your customer service training.
2. Model for it.
3. Empower employees to take the time and step out of their planned routine to offer it. (If Tonya had to worry that management would disapprove of the time taken away from her scheduled chores to help us, she could never have safely offered us the service that she did.)
4. Reward it. I’m not mostly thinking of financial awards, prizes, and the like. I mean applause, recognition, and support.
