VIP customer experience: why does it matter?

According to the Pareto principle, roughly 20% of your customer base is responsible for bringing 80% of revenues to your company. This is known as the 80-20 rule, which has become a cliche in marketing and management circles.

But even if it is a cliche, and although the specific figure changes based on industry and location, one thing remains true: a sliver of a corporation's clientele is responsible for the majority of its profits. These are the early adopters, the most loyal customers, and the company's stable base of revenues it can rely on to keep afloat and grow.

To succeed, you need to keep these customers happy. By providing a luxury, individualized experience, you can improve high-end customer satisfaction, increase retention, and even make additional sales, and in this article, we'll go over how!

Clients highly value personal attention, and no VIP client experience is complete without delivering products and services with a personal touch that demonstrates how highly you value your VIP clientele.

Assigning store associates to VIP guests: Assigning specific employees to each VIP client is an excellent way to offer an exceptional experience. A long-term partnership allows your employee to build rapport with the client, learn their preferences, and make educated recommendations. It is standard practice in virtually all luxury retail and restaurant businesses, and for good reason.
Offering digital two-way communication channels: By offering reliable, two-way communication channels to your VIP customers digitally, you'll improve customer service and build trust. With a touch of a finger tip, your most valuable customers can schedule and reschedule appointments or get in touch with you with their questions or concerns, allowing you to provide immediate answers. Solutions such as Waitwhile’s scheduling software are excellent tools for delivering a luxury experience.
Taking into account individual preferences: Catering your services and products to VIP clients is an important way of showing you care. This can range from writing personalized emails about products they might be interested in to issuing handwritten notes recommending services tailored to your needs. You need to communicate that you care.

Creating a VIP experience is all about offering exclusivity. Your VIP customers need to know that they are special. That they have unique access to products and services that they would otherwise not have if they weren't a VIP in your company.

Exclusivity can come in a variety of forms, the easiest being giving VIP clients early access to products or services slated for release. This requires minimal effort on your part while being a meaningful gesture for your clients.

Another common way to offer exclusivity is by introducing products or services with slight, often purely cosmetic, variations of existing lineups. These will act as a VIP status, a symbol your clients can use to demonstrate their exclusive access to your company's resources.

Lastly, for exceptional VIP experiences, exclusive events or products can be arranged. These initiatives require considerable resources, but they significantly enhance the value of your VIP program and foster customer loyalty.

To offer a proper VIP client experience, you need to properly package all the exclusive services you offer in a well-realized VIP program that provides clear value for your top-tier customers and elevates your brand.

There are several reasons why a VIP program is the most common way for businesses to create a VIP client experience:

Makes it easier to market your VIP offers: While random VIP events and periodic releases of exclusive products might make your high-end customers happy, they do not necessarily speak to the value of your VIP offerings. Who is to say you'll host a VIP event next year? By offering a VIP program, you commit to specific provisions that you'll reliably offer to your VIP customers, building trust and demonstrating value.
Improves customer loyalty: A VIP program essentially acts as a loyalty program for top customers. It makes them feel like they are part of an exclusive club and introduces an element of FOMO that you can effectively utilize to keep the loyalty and business of your clients.
Lets you offer point-based rewards: A well-realized VIP program allows you to introduce point-based rewards to give back to your most loyal customers consistently. The point-based system can be based on sales, purchase history, or any other data point your business values, making it a highly customizable way to reward customers.

How to Measure Customer Satisfaction

Take advantage of social media: Offering a VIP client experience is worthless if nobody hears about it. By leveraging advertising and publishing social media posts, you not only effectively advertise your VIP program but also share the exclusive experiences you've created for your existing VIP clientele, creating a feeling of exclusivity that is essential to the success of any VIP program.
Signal luxury: to demonstrate that you provide a truly exceptional service for your VIP clientele, you need to signal luxury and exclusivity. This can be done, for example, through organizing highly-publicized, exclusive events or by introducing limited-edition products.
Learn from your competitors: While there are general pointers that can be used by any business, regardless of its size and the industry it operates in, the most successful and effective efforts rely on industry-specific approaches that take into account the needs and priorities of your clientele. So it is vital you do proper competitor research and learn how other businesses in your industry have approached this problem!
Implement smart solutions: New technologies can optimize communication, scheduling, and resource management, all of which directly impact customer experiences. With Waitwhile's queue management system, you can reduce wait times, streamline appointments, and provide real-time updates to your clients. This approach offers twofold benefits: it minimizes no-shows and improves time management, while simultaneously showing your customers that you value their time.

Creating a VIP experience is an essential way for businesses to retain their loyal clientele and increase revenues. There are several strategies corporations can use to customize services and personalize communications to provide an improved customer experience and meet the expectations of high-end customers.

In this article:

appointment scheduling ,

queue management ,

customer experience ,

luxury retail

Jakob is a seasoned product marketing lead with a strong track record of transforming customer insights into compelling value propositions and effective marketing strategies.