I wrote the editorial about great service after noticing a couple small but interesting customer service experiences during two trips. I’ve continued to think about it since writing it. It’s an obvious win, but not an easy win, or even obvious on how do achieve the win. How we figure that out?

Maybe not complete, but I think we look at:

• In general, it’s something you’ll do many times
• It has to be something that the customer notices
• It has to be something that the customer perceives as great
• It’s fairly inexpensive to do

Those may not align at all with our own definition. Our employer may appreciate that we spent a few extra hours and improved performance by 10%, but they may well consider that to be ‘part of the job’, something worthy of a ‘nice job’ but not rising to great service. So a big challenge is finding ways to stand out, and then trying to figure out if customer notices/cares. Not simple! You can ask, but sometimes they won’t even know, or it will stretch beyond the financially doable. Still, it’s worth asking. More often it comes from an experience of our own that we can map into our own tasks.

It’s absolutely worth asking the question, because maybe they know and just assume you do to.

I’ll stretch my own definition a little with an example. Give me a choice of 10 candidates for a position with equivalent skills, and if I could, I’d pick the ones that:

• Take ownership
• Are there for me when I need them, even if not their “job”

Those are little things, but assuming you do the fundamentals right, just two things make a big difference in how I perceive your value. Fair? Maybe not entirely? Easy to do? I’d like to think so. But in hindsight I probably didn’t make that clear. Would it be bad to say this moves you into the great column? Or is at least one of the ways to do it?

Interesting stuff.