5 Ways to Offer White-Glove Service at Any and All Businesses

Providing white-glove service sets your brand apart from competitors by offering an exceptional guest experience.

Think white-glove service is only reserved for affluent retail and restaurant customers? If so, your brand is missing out on providing a guest experience that goes above and beyond those offered by your competitors.

“White-glove customer service is the process of surpassing clients’ expectations by prioritizing their needs, genuinely caring about their success, personalizing their experience, and solving issues before they arise,” according to inbound marketing company HubSpot.

“The key to providing white-glove service is being exceptional in your care, attention, and attitude toward customers.”

White-glove service provides a “premium” customer experience to all of your customers, not just the ones who bring in the most revenue, says HubSpot.

Read on for five tips on how to provide white-glove customer service to improve your brand’s overall customer experience.

1. Create a white-glove customer service strategy

HubSpot recommends creating your company’s customer service strategy using one of that company’s free templates. Your brand’s customer service strategy should include the following, according to HubSpot.:

• Company mission
• Customer support vision
• Team structure
• Support process
• Tools and software
• Goals and metric
• Budget

2.  Expand customer service beyond the call center

“To offer high-touch service to everyone, customer service can no longer be an isolated department,” says McKinsey & Company. “It must be tied into every business unit that interacts with the customer, including sales, marketing, product design, collections and the front line.

“While such services require technology investments and shifts in organizational structure, these investments and shifts will soon become mandatory as companies compete to meet customer expectations. All functions will benefit from the enterprise-wide visibility required to build comprehensive profiles of individual customers.”

3. Solve problems before they happen

“Busy customers experience white-glove treatment when they know they have an issue but the company raises it first — and solves it,” says McKinsey & Company.

For example, a consumer’s credit card company sends a text or email alerting the customer about suspicious activity on their account. Or an airline sends a text letting the customer know that their flight is delayed and offering alternate flights and times.

4. Personalize each customer’s experience

“When a customer does request help, companies can still provide exemplary service by predicting her needs based on her individual profile and providing a personalized response,” says McKinsey & Company, offering the example of a utility company’s interactive voice response (IVR) system.

For instance, the IVR may detect that a customer is calling about a higher-than-usual utility bill.

“The IVR runs analytics on the back end to review the bill and link it with data on recent temperatures and bills from similar customers in the area, quickly equipping the customer service agent to explain and provide a detailed report for the customer,” says McKinsey & Company.

5. Make improvements based on customer feedback

To provide white-glove customer service, your brand must first understand how well you’re currently serving your current customers, says HubSpot.

The best way to gain that understanding is by collecting feedback through “voice of the customer” methodologies, including sending customer surveys, conducting customer interviews, hosting focus groups and asking for feedback on social media platforms.

“That way, you can understand where you’ve met or exceeded expectations, and where you have room to provide a better experience,” says HubSpot.