Lesson 5: Going Above & Beyond


Customers (and that means co-workers as well as our clients and their clients) will usually feel gratitude and loyalty when we show that they are so important to us that they are worth going beyond the minimum expectations. Great customer service includes demonstrating, through our actions, that our customer is important and special. This can be done by:

  1. Being extra-friendly (especially via e-mail when words may not reflect your intended tone).
  2. Letting the customer know that we saw a need and filled it.
  3. Letting them know they did a great job on their submission (finding/catching them doing things right and sharing it with them).
  4. Thanking them for being accurate, friendly, helpful, thorough, etc.
  5. Seeing a better way to complete their request (adding a graphic, improved or multiple placement, clarifying their request to get it right, etc.)

Examples:

Instead of saying, “Please attach the board minutes for this request,” you could say “Hi , Thank you for your request. It looks like the board minutes didn’t make it along with this request. If you could please attach them, we’ll get this completed for you. Thanks for your help!”

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“Thank you for sending in a copy of the newsletter. I’ve added a copy of that to the website for parents to download. It was filled with wonderful information. Parents should be thrilled. Nice work!

“I also wanted to let you know I added that great article about the Christmas program to the news page and linked to it from the home page as well so we would be sure everyone got a chance to see what a great success that was.

“Hope you have a wonderful week! ”

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“Thanks so much for submitting the most recent website update. I’ve posted it as requested. I did want to mention that I noticed a typo on the date, and I changed that to the correct year (it’s so hard to break a year-long habit). Have a great rest of the week, and thanks for helping us keep the website current! ”

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“Thanks, Mary, for your recent website update. I just wanted to thank you for always being so thorough in your requests. You really make it easy for me to understand what you’re hoping to accomplish. You make my job much easier to do right! ”