The 5 principles of Good Customer Service | Customer service Tips 2021

When I decided to open my first business in the hospitality area— a hostel that later became one of the largest in Warsaw — I had no experience at all. My career until then was in airline headquarters, working with pricing optimization.

We struggled at the beginning. Reviews from dissatisfied customers punished our business. In this sector, image and reputation are almost everything, so this was putting our own existence at risk. Looking for solutions, I immersed myself in the written wisdom from great service entrepreneurs and that’s when I discovered a straightforward method. It uses 5 great principles, which I found in the masterpiece of Micah Solomon, Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit. They are principles valid for nearly all service industries, including:

• Gastronomy

• Consulting

• Events and Conferences

• Marketing Agencies

• Health Care

• Tourism & Hospitality

What all these sectors have in common? In all of them, your product is not tangible. In a car dealership or fashion store, you can touch and carry the item (cars and clothes, respectively). But when you are a consulting firm, a hotel, or an event producer, you are selling experiences.

When someone buys a car, it takes months, maybe years, to assess the product quality. But when a client buys a service, the quality is assessed in the instant. Often there is no second chance. You must hit in the first shot and the 5 principles can help you to ensure you do just that.

Principle 1 — The first step of service is a warm and sincere greeting

If your product is a service, you are selling it at the moment the client enters in contact with you. The sale starts before any financial transaction, any promise, even before you know that the customer is a customer.

Service sales start when you answer the phone, reply to an e-mail or greet a walk-in guest. Micah Solomon writes about the contrast between most shops and a singular, successful case. Street stores usually have their front door filled with signs like No Food, No Drink’ or Please Finish Your Food or Drink Before Entering Our Store. This is not the case of the Scrimshaw Workshop gift shop in Ben Harbor, Maine. Located at the side of a famous ice-cream shop, they welcome their customers with the statement YES! YOU MAY BRING IN YOUR ICE CREAM CONES — Just be careful of their drips.

This small sign is enough to make this store unique, expand their potential customer-base — mothers will not need to wait for their toddlers to finish the ice-cream before entering it — and give a warm, friendly welcome to any passerby.

In my Hostel, like in most tourist accommodations, there is a front desk receptionist who welcomes and bids farewell to guests or answers the phone. Their actions are among the biggest influences on our reputation.

One of my first changes was to establish the principle that the phone should never ring more than 3 times before someone answers. Any potential guest would think twice about reserving a room in a place that does not pick the phone. It gives an image of indifference and negligence, two characteristics that no service provider wants to associate with.

The way you greet potential customers will communicate the level of service your company provides. If you have a laid-back marketing agency and answer the phone with a serious, dark tone, you are sending the wrong signals to your potential customer. Maybe answer the phone with a more energetic salutation, or put a smile on your face — it makes your voice sounds better.

The first words on the phone, reception, or even by e-mail should always signal what the customer can expect from you. An insurance agency must be sober and transmit confidence. A backpacker hostel, on the other side, will adopt an easygoing, informal posture.

Principle 2: The subtle verbal and non-verbal code

A great lesson that any service business should learn with luxury hotels is to read the messages the customer is delivering.

Let’s suppose you arrive at one of the Ritz Carlton hotels in Thailand, on a hot afternoon. A sun strong enough to make anyone dehydrated. The bellman or any other first-contact employee most likely will offer you a glass of cold water in your first minutes inside.

How this is different from most other hotels? In some, if you ask the reception he will tell you that probably there are some vending machines nearby so you should look for it, so he can return to whatever he was doing. This is what we call non-compliant service. It is the level where you fulfill only the most basic customer requests. Do you want water? Go there and buy it, it is not my obligation to know where you find it.

The second level of service is called reactive-service. In this case, the reception would tell, in a pleasant manner, where the client can find a glass of cold water. Eventually, he may even offer it himself. This level looks satisfactory, and for most standards, it should be. However, it is still, as the name implies, reactive. The customer needed to be vocal about his needs so the receptionist could fulfill them.

How this is different from Ritz? There, employees — or, as they call it, ladies and gentlemen — have their attention dedicated to subtle signals. Customers from this luxury hotel often do not need to vocalize their needs

I applied this principle to my hostel by training our staff to watch the customer during check-in. If the guest is an elderly couple with difficulty climbing stairs, we offer a room on the ground floor. If it is a group of friends, the reception is free to upgrade them to adjacent rooms, so everyone stays close. These and other examples helped us to improve our reputation — although we still have a long road to reach excellency.

When you start to pay attention to your customers' needs and anticipate it, magic happens. The perception that they will have about your business will be boosted. It is a huge benefit for a cost that can be as low as a glass of water.

Anticipatory service ignites customer loyalty.

Principle 3: Adjust to the pace of the customer.

You cannot attend to a chatty, meandering tourist in the same way you would serve a time-stressed, introverted banker. It is the server’s job to pick up on this. Micah Solomon

This is similar to one of the points from principle 1. Here, however, we are talking about the entire service delivery, not only the first contact. During decades, managers adapted Taylorism and industrial concepts to service. That led to a wave of standardization and destroyed flexibility. Service processes, standards, and systems became too rigid, inflexible, lacking adaptation to customer needs.

Already in the 90s, CEOs started to demonstrate concern with excessive standardization. In the service industry, a change started. The study of customer behavior developed and, with it, service customization.

At my business, we adopted this principle by considering our two largest customer segments: international tourists and local travelers.

The first step was to develop two different websites, with different sets of information and different languages. A simple translation of what we offer to different languages was not enough. International tourists have completely different needs from local guests, so we needed to address it correctly in our communication.

It worked.

Principles 4 and 5: The bubble is the sanctuary of the guest, so know when to close or open it.

The concept of personal space, together with the limits in what you can or cannot talk about, varies from country to country.

In an era when people from different cultures and backgrounds do business with each other, this represents a tremendous barrier. Even a smile might embarrass you.

So more than ever, service providers should understand the nuances of the customer bubble, which we define here as the limits of personal space, time, and conversation subject.

Few simple rules will help to not bust the customer bubble and cause discomfort, or worse: irritation.

1st — If the timing’s wrong to disturb the customer, don’t. Your procedures and timing need to be based on the customer’s convenience, not yours. Don’t change out the salt and pepper shakers on the table when customers are seated. (Micah Solomon)

2 — If during an informal, pre-sale conversation your prospect customer shows any hesitation with a certain subject, avoid it. While for Indians, a conversation about salaries is ok, Italians keep this kind of information confidential. This is just one example of many. Know the cultural nuances of your customers.

3 — While Americans tend to be very straightforward during business meetings, some Asian cultures prefer a long and non-related chat before going to the main topic. The idea of each is to know each other better and assess intentions. If you go too slow or too fast with your clients, you may hit the wall.

In the case you have international guests, as my business has, I recommend applying the Pareto principle. It will help you to select in which cultural aspects you must specialize. This principle states that for most situations, 20% or less of the parts will be responsible for 80% of the results.

In my example, while we serve more than 50 nationalities, only 6 countries are responsible for 90% of our income. They are Poland, the UK, Russia, Belarus, the US, and Ukraine. Our staff knows very well the cultural differences between each of them.

The customer opens the personal bubble for you when he shows interest in doing business with your company. This is the greeting phase. In the same way, when business is concluded — either with a negative outcome or with a positive delivery — the bubble is closing. It is important here that the service providers know when it is closing, or when it is only a subtle signal for business continuation. As Micah Solomon explains:

When the waiter returns with the coffee, there is a final element. […] The server brings the cup of coffee back, with appropriate niceties. His responsibility now is to ask, ‘‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’’.The customer has two options: ‘‘Yes, there is,’’ or ‘‘No, there is not.’’ Depending on the answer, the door to the sanctuary may stay open, or it may be shut again. […] But before you move to the closing, make sure you ask a final question, slowly and sincerely: ‘‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’’ If the answer is ‘‘No, thank you,’’ then move to the closing.

If the bubble is closing, provide a personal farewell and an invitation for return. Good wishes work well too. Here we always wish all our guests a good trip. For other service business, it is possible to include farewells like:

• Consulting, after the delivery of the contract project plan: I wish you all the success in your project, Mr. Client!!

• Advertising Agency, after a TV campaign conclusion: I wish you a great but busy time with all the new customers, Mr. Client!

• Wedding Planner, on the day after the party: I wish you both a happy life together, Mr. and Mrs. Happy Couple!

With such kind closures, chances increase that the Mr. Client will remember the Ad Agency for the campaign of the next year, or that the Happy Couple will remember that the Wedding Planner also plans baptisms when their baby is born.

A sincere greeting, a proper reading of subtle signals, the adjustment to the customer pace, the knowledge of the customer bubble, and the kind farewell summarize how these five principles can bring luxury hotel levels of satisfaction to your business, no matter what service you provide.

Levi Borba is CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com, creator of the channel Small Business Hacks, and best-selling author. You can check his books here, his other articles here, or his Linkedin here.