What promise do you make to your customers?

One of the foundations of Amazing Service is to create and publish customer service standards (or promises). When you do this we call it your Customer Experience Promise. It tells people what to expect when they do business with you. It tells them how you’ll be treated, among other things.

This list of promises should be based on two things:

1. What your customers want from you.

2. What you are good at doing.

Once you create your Customer Experience Promise, you should publish it. This means tell the world about it. When you publish it, you are giving people the opportunity to know how you do business. And you’re enabling them to give you better feedback. Your Customer Experience Promise become a point of reference. It helps frame any feedback and other conversations.

Here is a deceptively simple yet effective example.

I was driving around one day and saw a contractor van that said this:

Bobs handyman services
We return all calls promptly.

That’s it. Of course there was a phone number too. But the entire message was they return ALL calls PROMPTLY.

As a customer of a handyman (who also returns all calls promptly) I can vouch for the importance of this promise. Customers do not want to wait around wondering if the guy will ever call back. And if he can’t return a phone call with any reliability, then the rest of his work may be suspect too. At least that’s how my thinking would be, as a customer.

So I applaud “Bob” with his simple yet important message.

What promises do you make to your customers? And how do you let them know?