White glove service isn’t just for restaurants and high-end retailers. Here’s how your company can offer a premium customer service experience to all of your customers.

Is your brand providing “white glove” customer service? While good customer service makes your company stand out from competitors, offering concierge-level white glove service takes customer service to the next level, resulting in customer satisfaction and loyalty.

More than half (51 percent) of customers say they will leave a brand if they receive service that doesn’t live up to their expectations, according to “The Global State of Customer Experience,” a report from customer service insight resource CX Network.

White glove service can be the key to retaining those customers.

The term white-glove service once referred primarily to a premium customer experience typically offered to clients with a “high lifetime value,” according to inbound marketing platform HubSpot.

“In a traditional setting, you would welcome these customers into the store or restaurants literally wearing white gloves, then cater to their every need and request,” says HubSpot. “These customers were typically affluent and/or provided the company enough revenue to warrant white-glove service.

“In other contexts, white-glove service refers to delivering expensive items to the home, assembling it and setting it up in the right space.”

White glove service today encompasses a much broader range of industries that provide all of their customers the same level of premium customer experience, says HubSpot.

4 tips for providing white glove customer service

“The old customer service tricks won’t cut it anymore,” says HubSpot. “If you want to delight customers and increase your retention rate, then providing white-glove customer service is a must. “By doing so, you’ll surpass expectations and create delightful experiences that keep your clients coming back for more.”

Providing white-glove service is one of the best ways your brand can start building a customer-centric company culture, says HubSpot, which  recommends the following steps to put your white glove plan in place.

1. Create a white glove customer service strategy

“For your company to start providing white-glove service, you need to create a customer service strategy that guides every single one of your interactions. Your strategy will inform how you serve your clients and train your service reps moving forward,” says HubSpot.

A strong customer service strategy includes the following, according to HubSpot:

• Mission statement
• A vision for customer support
• Team structure
• Support process
• Tools and software
• Goals and Metric
• A budget

2. Use customer feedback to improve service

Collect customer feedback to gain an understanding of how well your company is currently serving your customers and find areas where your brand can improve.

3. Implement personalization strategies

“As you begin to collect feedback, start implementing personalization strategies — especially in your website and emails — that make your customer feel like you know them personally and want to serve them specifically,” says HubSpot.

“While personalization is often correlated with marketing, it’s powerful in a service context, too. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a white-glove service experience is its personalization.”

4. Offer a seamless experience to meet customer needs

Taking a long time to resolve customer issues leads to a poor customer experience. To provide a white glove customer experience, your company must offer a customer experience based on “exactitude and expediency,” says HubSpot:

“When you think of white-glove service, you think of a premium, painless experience that leaves the customer delighted and eager to return to your business. Taking a long time to solve their problems is a sure way to provide a poor experience. Providing a sloppy, cobbled-together solution is another.”

For example, your company might focus on resolving customer issues and questions on the first call or contact by offering an omnichannel experience, automated communication options such as chatbots and live chat and training customer service reps to faster, personalized service.

“Some tools you might leverage at this stage include customer service software, customer service training templates, and script templates for your service reps,” says HubSpot. “That way, you can resolve issues much more quickly without decreasing the quality of the interaction.

“By far, the most important thing you can do to provide white-glove customer service is training your reps. They’re the ones who’ll be interfacing your clients and providing the service itself.”

Your brand can gain customer loyalty by offering concierge-level customer service — even if you’re not in the hotel or hospitality industry.

Most people are familiar with hotel concierges, the friendly, helpful staff members skilled at making a guest’s stay as seamless as possible. Hotel concierges fulfill many customer-centric duties such as arranging restaurant reservations, taxi or rideshare transportation, entertainment, booking pre-arrival spa appointments and more.

The hotel concierge is also dedicated to resolving guest concerns or issues and will go above and beyond to make sure hotel guests are taken care of for an exceptional stay.

Today the hotel concierge model crosses over into multiple industries, including customer call centers, health insurance providers, concierge medicine, travel and more.

“By applying the benefits of concierge customer service to your business, you distinguish yourself from your competition,” said Dr. Jeanne Hurlbert, president of customer-centric marketing firm Hurlbert Consulting Group in an article on the agency’s website:

“Concierge Customer Service enables you to work with your customers at a level your competitors cannot touch — they can’t match the value you’re bringing to those customers and won’t be able to challenge your business with those customers.”

What is concierge-level customer service?

The goal of concierge-level service is to fulfill the customer’s needs in as seamless a manner as possible so the customer feels valued by your brand — instead of just one more customer to get out of the way so an employee can move on to the next customer or call.

With call center concierge-level service, the call center representative resolves the customer’s issue in one call. For example, if an authorization, reference code, or additional information is needed, the rep doesn’t cause additional frustration by transferring the caller or giving them a new number to call so they can wait on hold even longer.

Instead, they place the caller on hold while getting the information so the customer doesn’t have to call back or they hold a three-way call with the customer and another department. In some cases, the call center rep ends the call, then obtains the information to call the customer back.

Concierge-level service goes digital

Some companies that rely heavily on digital customer service frustrate their customers by directing them away from a live agent to “confusing FAQs and dead-end knowledge bases,” according to customer service resource Customer Contact Week:

“Consequently, digital-first companies have begun to offer digital concierges designed to help customers who need help with technical troubleshooting.”

Retail stores can offer digital concierge-level customer service, too. For example, Home Depot offers an in-store product locator on its app so that customers can quickly find the aisle where the product they need is located.

This concierge-level service saves the customer time and frustration from having to hunt down an employee or browse the entire store to get what they need.

Benefits of concierge-level service

Concierge-level customer service removes the dread and frustration that typically comes with contacting a busy call center with long hold times and then finding out the agent can’t answer your question during the call.

“While concierges are best known for stepping in to fix problems or offer unexpected perks, true concierge service involves removing the pain from an otherwise painful experience,” says Customer Contact Week.