Customer Relationship Building Strategy #3: Above and Beyond The Call

The third customer relationship strategy involves letting your customers know what you have to offer. But what I encourage is that you tell them what you’re going to give them and then give them more. I have used this practice in every one of my businesses. You promise what you’re going to do for them and you promise that you can solve their problem, (if of course you can!), but then you go above and beyond. You do that little bit extra; add that extra value. But here is the important part: let them know that you did that for them. This part is really critical. There are a lot of businesses that do extra. They go that little bit above and beyond, but they forget to make sure that their clients know that they have received extra value.

For example, there were a lot of times early in my practice, before I understood the strategies, when someone would come into my office and we would do the basic chiropractic care. But on top of that we would also include some extra therapies. We wouldn’t charge them for those and all we would basically say would be, “Have a nice day!” But those extra therapies were valuable. So now what we’ve trained our staff to say is something like this: “We just wanted to let you know that you had your chiropractic visit, but in addition to that we also did a massage therapy or heat therapy or we’ve provided you with this appliance. Normally our charges for that would be $300, but for you there is no charge. We just want to make sure that you’re comfortable.” It’s very important to let them know what you’ve done for them.

Here’s another example: I have a friend who is a very high-end carpenter and when he used to go to his clients’ homes to do finished carpentry work, he would often do little extra things because he is a very meticulous person. He was really terrific at what he did, but he would do the extra things and the bill would not show that he had given the client added value. Once after he had done work at my house I met with him and shared, “Ray, you know I really appreciate that you’ve done these extra things but you have given them no extra value. You’re not increasing the value of yourself and your company.” So I recommended that when he completed his jobs that, even though he is not going to charge for the extras he does, he should let the customers know how much he actually did for them.

So now on Ray’s invoices, he lists all the things that they had agreed on at a certain price and then he writes, for example, “In addition to that, we also did this extra chair. We repaired this, we patched that, we laid about 20 extra feet of board on your floor, we made this look right, and I didn’t like the way the last guy hung that door so we re-hung it for you. Normally that would have cost you $2,000 but that’s all at no extra charge because I wanted to make sure the job got done right”.

So when you over-deliver, let them know that you over-delivered. Tactfully letting them know that it was done is a very important step in your customer relationship building strategy.