Exceptional service stories

Most people have a story about really execrable service.

Many people also have a story about exceptional service.

I imagine that most business owners would prefer to have their business featured in the second category.

When it comes to exceptional service stories, some analysis might be in order from the business point of view. For example, you could wonder whether the amazing service your customer received is part of an integrated service culture in your organization, or simply a "random act" of kindness, leadership, or good sense.

This kind of analysis is important, because while it may be easy to have a few star people on your team, the ones all your customers want to work with, it's much more difficult to inculcate a service culture supported by intelligent processes which ensure some level of consistency.

Why is consistency so important? Exceptional service stories help to illustrate why. Imagine that I rave to you about the amazing service at a restaurant in our city. Our server was so on top of things, everything was so smooth, she went out of her way and really made my celebration lunch a fabulous event. She did everything she could to make it fantastic!

You think: perfect. I have an important celebration coming up, so I'll go there. You reserve, you go, you have high expectations, and from the start you feel like you're in a completely different restaurant than the one I described. Nothing is smooth, no one seems to being taking care of you, and you're really, really disappointed.

You feel like you're in a different restaurant because you are. Without that special server (or manager, or account rep, or mail carrier), everything is different.

So, the question is, what can you learn from exceptional service stories that you can use to improve the experience of all your customers? One thing you could do would be to simply start collecting these stories and looking for potentially extendable best practices. What are the great people doing that we should make into standard practice? The concept here is to copy success.
A quick template for copying success could be:

1. Collect exceptional service stories



2. Detect spreadable best practices



3. Train your people on these practices



4. Incorporate these into your standard procedures



5. Monitor and improve!