6 Characteristics Of Masterful Customer Service: How Do You Stack Up?

There are a dozen characteristics that are common to masterful companies: businesses that delight their customers by providing outstanding, customer-friendly service throughout the range of their interactions and interfaces. However, that’s too many for a Forbes article, so I can only share the first six with you today.  See how you compare to this list.

1. The masterful company makes customers feel welcomed even before they physically or figuratively arrive, regardless of which channel of approach they use. Whether on the web, via email, telephone, social media, chat, or videoconference, employees welcome customers, offering particular, intimate, and thorough knowledge of their location, their brand, their company.

The company frequently vets online, telephone, and other inbound experiences to ensure these are functioning and up to date; any channel the customer may use to approach the company has been recently checked for validity and ease of entry. This is true not only on the company’s own sites but on third-party sites as well, like Google GOOGL -0.56%Places.

(It’s important to keep in mind that customers don’t blame Google but rather the merchant if hours and location are posted incorrectly. They assume—by and large correctly—that the company has had ample opportunity to update its information and keep it current.)

Negative comments on Yelp YELP -0.45%, TripAdvisor TRIP +0.12%, and similar forums have been politely responded to, so the arriving customer knows that the company, even if not perfect, is at least concerned with addressing imperfections and striving to improve customer service at every turn.

2. The company strips the customer’s arrival experience of barriers that might hamper the experience. A masterful company doggedly works to remove barriers so the entrance experience is smooth and welcoming, whether those barriers are, legalistically speaking, its responsibility or not. In the brick-and-mortar (physical) world, for example, parking and other transportation needs of customers are considered carefully. Driving directions offered are impeccably accurate, and GPS coordinates are provided as appropriate. If parking on the street is necessary, the company provides change for meters along with reminders to feed those meters, or has valets standing by to assist. In an online ‘‘entrance,’’ the sign-in process is streamlined. There are ideally no CAPTCHAs (visual security challenges) that visitors are required to slog through in order to use the contact forms on the company website. Or if there are CAPTCHAs, due to spam or hacking concerns, they’re accompanied by an intelligible, user-friendly audio component so people with visual disabilities, or those using your site via an itsy-bitsy smartphone keyboard, aren’t locked out. A customer never has to sort through hundreds of choices to enter his home country, when that could be easily determined by IP address or general knowledge of the customer base.

3. Employees show an obvious, sincere interest in customers. Watch for it: These employees may actually appear to have a certain visible glow, even in the most befuddling customer service situations. Employees give their electiveefforts rather than sticking to the minimum possible that keeps them out of disciplinary action.

4. The company honors its customers’ desire for self-service . . . but with clearly visible escape hatches. A customer who has opted for self-service is never left hanging without available support or an escape route, nor is he otherwise penalized for his choice. For example, retailers who offer self-checkout lines keep service attendants nearby to help customers who experience unexpected difficulties operating the register; on the phone, properly configured IVRs (interactive voice response systems) allow customers to reach a human operator the way that they expect—by hitting ‘‘O’’ or saying ‘‘agent.’’ Online, FAQs include an option at the end of each answer for customers to receive further assistance via live support when the scripted answer has failed to serve successfully.

5. Processes, technologies, and facilities have been put in place that anticipate the customer’s needs and desires. Anticipatory service means more than hiring the right people, empathetic people who each individually take responsibility for anticipating what customers want. While the right people are central to delivering great service, it’s also important to align systems with customers’ desires—even before these desires are voiced. A company accomplishes this by first making it clear that its goal is to learn to think like customers, observe and predict their behavior, query them on their desires, and tabulate the responses so the company can anticipate what customers want next.

Then it has to take the crucial next step: building this knowledge and attitude into systems, facilities, and processes.

For example: Due to a dusting of snow on the runway during a Philadelphia winter, I was delayed for a couple hours on the tarmac. Not surprisingly, I missed my connection in Denver as a result. But as I stepped off the plane in Denver, thinking I was going to need to wait in an endless line and plead my case for a rebooking, or call the 800 number and wait on hold, a gate agent from Southwest came to me, with a sheaf of already-rebooked tickets in hand. She asked my name and then handed me the correct one—for the very next available flight to my destination.

6. The company keeps customer time constraints and pacing needs front and center. The company never wastes the customer’s time; masterful businesses are no-waiting zones. As a corollary of this, the pacing needs and expectations of individual customers are taken into account by engaged, skilled staff or well-conceived technology. For example, the time-stressed internet executive is treated differently than the leisurely tourist, based on cues received. These cues can be picked up face to face or over the telephone by an attentive human, or by receptive software that allows users to hit ‘‘not now’’ for multiple options in order to cut to the chase online.