What is superior service?

Open Chord defines superior service as that service that increases the emotional connection a customer feels with the service provider. This is not just glib therapy-speak, it means your customers are more likely to use - and to pay a premium for - your services in future.

To understand superior service it’s worth viewing the alternatives:

• Functional service - where the service provided meets our basic requirements but adds no emotional value whatsoever.
• Inferior, or mediocre, service - where the service provided doesn’t meet our requirements and is delivered in such a way as to produce a negative emotional response.

To take a simple example, imagine you are catching a train on a windy station platform. You’re early and would like to sit down to wait. You go into a waiting room that has seats and that stops the biting wind coming through. This meets your needs but adds little additional value: it’s a functional service.

Superior service would add value to your experience by providing, for example, warmth, refreshment or comfortable seating whereas inferior service would be where the seats were broken, the room smelt bad or the door did not close properly - any one of a number of things that could inconvenience or annoy you.

Continuing with the analogy, your waiting room experience is only one of a number of separate experiences on your journey. If your train is delayed or overcrowded you may feel that overall you have had an inferior service. However if some elements of your journey were superior this may make you feel more positively about your experience.

To help understand what’s going on in customer experience Open Chord’s blog records day-to-day interactions and transactions against this simple framework.