Finding the Standard for Premium Customer Service

“Treat others the way you wish you were treated.”
“The customer is always right.”

Successful service teams use these two mantras as guiding principles.WP Engine, like most social businesses, looks to leaders in customer service for inspiration and ideas.

Three companies who lead by example are Ritz Carlton, Nordstrom and Disney. These are organizations from different industries that go above and beyond to help each guest, shopper or customer.

Anticipate the needs of the guests.
Ritz Carlton is known for taking a simple request and anticipating the needs of the guest. Ritz Carlton uses a three step process for customer service. The second step is anticipation and fulfillment of each guest’s needs. For example, one story goes that a guest of Ritz Carlton was deep sea fishing and caught a large tuna. Upon returning to the hotel, the guest needed ice to keep the fish fresh. The doorman volunteered to take the cooler and get more ice. But he didn’t stop there. He took the tuna to the kitchen and had it cleaned and cut by the cook supervisor. Then cleaned the cooler, packaged, and stored the tuna in the cooler with fresh ice.

Not only did the doorman volunteer to help with the immediate need of the guest, he anticipated future needs and took steps to ensure the guest would not have to worry about the work of cleaning and cutting the tuna. The doorman worked across teams to solve a series of problems the guest had.

Offer the customer the best possible service, selection, quality and value.
A dad came into Nordstrom’s needing an Armani tuxedo for his daughter’s wedding. After searching other nearby stores and coming up empty-handed, the dad went to Nordstrom in a final effort to see if he could get one. The kicker: Nordstrom didn’t even carry Armani.

The personal shopper heard his story, took his measurements and went to work. She wanted the dad to have the Armani tuxedo just as if he was her dad. Instead of saying “sorry we don’t carry Armani,” she worked her network and the tuxedo showed up two days later ready to go with all the alterations made.

The personal shopper took the request and provided the best possible service by finding the perfect tuxedo for him.

Treat every guest like a VIP.
Disney is “The Happiest Place on Earth” for many reasons. The number one reason is because they treat every guest like a VIP.

Upon visiting the Magic Kingdom, guests are given a badge with their name on it if it is their first visit or if they are celebrating a birthday. Employees, or characters, are trained to greet each guest by name and with them the best on their birthday or on their first visit. Each visitor receives a unique one-on-one experience. By creating a personal experience from the snack carts to rides, each guest remembers the people they have interacted with, not the product.

At WP Engine, we believe our customers should receive the best service possible, and that is why we model our customer service after companies who put the same priority on service.

When customers file a support ticket, we work to resolve the ticket and fix anything that we come across that they might need help with next in the process. We proactively update their WordPress instance so they don’t have to worry about doing it themselves.

We work across teams to resolve tickets. There are many times engineering, support, development and even marketing work together to ensure the ticket is resolved.

Customer Service is an integral part of our culture. And to make sure that customer service stays a part of our culture we recently dedicated an entire day to resolving the tickets. And it was all hands on board. Support, Engineering, Development, Operations, Marketing, Human Resources, Accounting and the Management teams went nose to the grindstone and cleared our queues in one day.

By prioritizing customer service, we know everything else we do will be better. We will have the best platform because we take their feedback and create an environment they want to use. Customers will have the fastest website because we created a top tier caching system to serve customer sites at lightning speed to multiple users at once.

Are we going to please 100% of our customer 100% of the time? No, but are we going to strive to? Yes! Companies such as Nordstrom, Ritz Carlton and others with superior customer service will continue to be our standard. We hope to one day become the standard for other companies to model their service after.

We’ve named a few of the best customer service companies. What are some of the companies you look to for customer service? What companies have you experienced the best customer service from? We’re excited to hear. We are continually looking for the best customer service practices to model after.