The aim of this blog is to explore what superior service means, why it is that some organisations are particularly good at it and why some seem to struggle.

The basic premise is that there is far too much service out there that is just functional and quite a bit that is inferior or worse. So, improving service from inferior or just OK to superior represents an opportunity that many organisations are not exploiting.

What is superior service?

The definitions I am using for this site are straightforward: superior service is an experience with an organisation that creates a positive emotional connection, functional service is an experience that is neutral and inferior service creates a negative connection (anger frustration). You don’t need to be a customer service guru to work out that if more of your customers have a positive emotional connection they are more likely to return to you in future and recommend you to their friends. Leave them feeling neutral and you are less likely to retain them. Leave them angry and you might as well send their contact details to your competitors.

Stories rather than numbers

Those with a statistical approach to customer satisfaction won’t find much to satisfy them on this blog – at least not in the near future. If we are dealing with emotional connections then, by definition, asking people whether they felt happy, moderately happy or otherwise with the service they received is likely to be a blunt instrument at best. To that end I will be documenting my own personal experiences with organisations I encounter on a day-to-day basis and I would encourage you to contribute your own experiences. This will help build up a ‘field guide’ to those organisations offering superior service.

Contribute!

By posting your own comments you’ll be helping develop an understanding of what superior service looks like and, more importantly, what organisations can learn about how to provide it. (You’ll also extend the boundaries beyond my own bit of the UK and other areas I may travel to: I’m keen to understand any different cultural attitudes to service.)

Although it’s tempting to report ‘horror stories’, there a quite a number of sites that allow you to do that (e.g. Grumbletext in the UK), so please focus on superior service where possible.