To create customer loyalty and use extreme customer service as a competitive force to dominate your market, you must follow a multistep process that begins with creating a baseline of satisfactory customer service.

So, let’s start there.

Creating a satisfied customer is straightforward and achievable. It depends on four fundamentals that have to exist in your customer service and overall customer experience:

The first essential is what I would, advisedly, call a perfect product.

Now, nothing in this world is perfect, so let’s be clear on our definition: It is designed and manufactured to perform correctly (“perfectly”) under reasonably expected circumstances. Now, you may not think you’re selling a product, but I expect you are, and you need to confirm that this “product” part of your offering meets the “perfect product” definition.

Related: The Customer Is Always Worth Listening to, But Proving You’re Right Can Backfire

Let’s say you’re a financial advisor: aside from your planning and investing services, there is a product aspect involved: your online help options, your décor, the ease of finding and using disabled parking (if your clients visit you in person), how your invoices are designed, and whether your billing is routinely correct.

Second, customer satisfaction is dependent on the delivery of your service by caring people. (Or, at least, people who treat the customers with care; whatever is in your heart of hearts is not what matters here; fantastic actors are more than welcome.)

The third element is timeliness. The tricky thing is that timeliness is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder, in this case, is your customer. This means that to achieve a level of timeliness that will lead to a satisfied customer, you need to have your ear to the ground as to how your customers view your scheduling performance and adjust as needed.

The fourth and final element is a service recovery approach, an effective framework that prompts and guides you to effective action any time something goes wrong in your customer’s eyes. Once you implement this service recovery framework, you’ll be ready and able to turn around nearly any situation where your customer is disappointed, upset or even angry. Even with your perfect product, things will go wrong, and your response is much of what matters in the end.

Related: Why AI Customer Service Will Get a Whole Lot Better in 2024

If you don’t already have a service recovery approach that works for you, consider my MAMA Method:

• Make time to listen
• Acknowledge and/or apologize
• have a Meeting of minds with the customer
• Act! And follow up. You can have the complete write-up of this framework as my gift at this link.

So now we’ve built a satisfied customer. But a satisfied customer isn’t the be-all and end-all of what you’re hoping to create, so to speak, and use as a dependable, sustainable competitive advantage.

A satisfied customer will bring their business back to you as a repeat customer, all things being equal, but this “all things being equal” is unreliable: Any given day, a satisfied customer may be attracted by a slightly lower price, a slightly better location, or really, nothing definable other than that they think you’re interchangeable with other brands out there.

So, if you’re looking to use customer service as a competitive advantage, you need to get as many customers as possible out of the satisfied zone and into the zone of customer loyalty and engagement. A loyal customer is less price sensitive, more forgiving when you mess up an occasional order, and the most willing to try out your add-ons and line extensions.

Related: The 4-Step Secret to Exceptional Customer Service

To reliably build a loyal customer, rather than just a satisfied one, you generally need to add “that something extra.” That something extra can be a “wow” moment. Sometimes, “wow” is an over-the-top gesture, such as the great stories you’ve heard of Ritz-Carlton finding the kid’s toy and sending it on an elaborate, photographed journey before mailing it back to him. These moments are powerful because we think in terms of stories, and they give your customer a story that will distinguish you from the competitive crowd.

There is also what I call “everyday wow”: this adds a little extra to every interaction (at least every interaction where it seems that the customer has time to be wowed).

Another essential is anticipatory customer service, which is answering questions that haven’t yet been voiced and fulfilling needs and wishes that haven’t even been asked for. Anticipatory customer service is essential in letting customers know you always have their interests (and wishes) in mind.

A particular kind of anticipatory customer service is also one of the least splashy. It’s recognition, a feeling for the customer that they’re being seen, both as a human being and as a particular human being. This is always an unexpressed wish: nobody says, “Hey, when I come into the parts department at your car dealership, I want to be recognized. I want to be greeted as and treated as an individual.”

But when you provide this recognition, it’s a very powerful and secret (or now, not so secret) force for bringing them back again and again.