White glove customer service

Named after the white glove servers wear in high-end restaurants and hotels, white glove customer service stands for the highest quality of customer service a company can provide to its client base.

From designing an individualized customer journey down to providing personal, onsite customer care, white glove services ensure that every need of your customer is met every step of the way.

But does your business truly need to provide this standard of customer support? What are its benefits? These are the questions we are going to explore in this article.

Why do businesses need to provide white glove customer service?

While improving service delivery and product quality are essential to the success of any business, the quality and the reliability of customer care are equally, if not more, important.

Customers need to know you care about them and take their needs into account, and white glove customer service is one of the best ways of doing that:

Increased customer loyalty

Businesses need a core, reliable base of customers to ensure a stable source of revenue they can use to build and grow. These core customers represent the commanding share of most companies' revenues over the long term. To succeed, businesses need to keep their core customers happy.

By providing excellent customer service that truly takes into account the individual tastes of your core customers and rewards them for their loyalty, you can solidify and grow this crucial stream of revenue.

Upselling

Most businesses provide multiple tiers of products and services, and depending on how much they cost, they can be either very affordable or a sizable purchase that requires careful consideration.

Standard customer service suffices when providing affordable goods, but white glove customer service allows you to upsell crucial services and products to the right clients. You can provide personalized customer service that assures your clients that your services and products are well worth the money, you can do research to see how you can best meet their needs, and you can offer unique deals tailored to the situation. This is the customer service excellence needed to upsell. 

Better brand representation

Reputation matters. How your brand is perceived can have a crucial impact on your sales, on your digital footprint, and on your competitiveness vis-à-vis your direct competitors. Larger companies pay millions of dollars to improve their brand recognition and ensure it is associated with positive sentiments.

Providing white glove customer service that exceeds customer expectations is an excellent way to make sure your brand is recognized and associated with exceptional service.

Gaining a competitive edge

In today's competitive market, it is getting harder and harder for businesses to stand out. Both traditional and digital media are saturated with ads, and marketing campaigns are becoming increasingly inefficient. Gaining a competitive advantage in this environment can be extremely difficult.

By offering a unique and premium customer service, you not only make your business stand out but also improve the perception of your business and take advantage of word-of-mouth marketing. This helps you gain a competitive edge and contributes to the long-term success of your business.

How to implement white glove services?

Properly providing a white glove customer experience isn't an easy task. It requires the complete reimagining of how you handle customer service, the use of new tools and processes, and extensive training sessions.

There are, however, some core and important elements that you can implement right away to improve your customer experience:

Provide a personalized service

Providing a personalized experience is a crucial component of white-glove customer service. It creates a lasting impression and ensures customer satisfaction. This isn't easy, however.

To provide a personalized service, your employees need to learn how to make your customers feel valued, they need to make an effort to add a personal touch when interacting with customers, and they need to appropriately and quickly answer customer inquiries.

At Waitwhile, we give employers and their employees the tools and software they need to establish two-way communication channels with their customers, provide personalized assistance on the fly, and create tailored solutions that meet the expectations of their clientele.

Provide training programs to employees

Employees are at the forefront when handling customers. You can provide excellent services, affordable products, outvalue all your competitors, but without excellent customer-focused service, the customer experience will suffer.

Offering proper training programs for your employees is an excellent way to boost morale, improve customer interactions, and provide an exceptional white glove service that helps put your business on the map.

Communication is key

To truly provide a white glove customer service, you need to make sure your clients are attended to at all times. Do they have questions or concerns? Have there been any changes to their schedule? Are there updates to pricing or company policy? In all of these situations, the company needs to quickly and clearly communicate with its clients. This enhances customer satisfaction and improves customer retention.

Not only do you need to train your employees on how to communicate with clients appropriately, but you also need to have the service and the technological capacity to answer the clients' questions and concerns in a reasonable amount of time.

This is precisely why Waitwhile has designed robust 2-way communication channels right into its queueing software. This allows businesses to quickly and seamlessly communicate changes to the client while giving the client the ability to ask questions and request assistance.

Tips to improve service delivery

Collect customer data

The best way to improve the customer service experience is to collect data, and a lot of it. Customer data can help you understand how your services are received, how much time it takes to offer individual services, where delays occur most often, and much more.

A stream of customer data helps you understand how your business is doing, make changes when appropriate, and ensure continuous improvement to service quality. This is an essential quality if your business wants to ensure it can continue meeting customer needs and expectations as the market evolves.

Ask for customer feedback

To provide an exceptional service, you need to understand exactly what your customers want and expect, and you can't do that without listening to them. This is why customer feedback is an essential component of enhancing customer satisfaction.

Feedback can be collected in a number of ways. Direct surveys and questionnaires are a great, if time-consuming, way to collect large volumes of feedback from customers. Emails and questionnaires are another way to reach a large number of clients and ensure the feedback you are taking is somewhat representative.

At Waitwhile, we give our users the ability to send feedback requests automatically whenever a client concludes a visit, allowing companies to collect vital customer data.

Grow your business with excellent customer service

Customer service is a cornerstone of any business. It is at the heart of the customer experience, and it directly impacts the success of your business from reviews to revenues.

An excellent way to improve the perception of your company and improve conversion rates is by providing individualized, white glove customer service that goes above and beyond to meet all the clients' needs. How to go about that, however, isn't a linear path, and this blog post helps you explore your options.