Suppose you are the director of a hotel group. (Stay with me on this one.) In one, an experienced worker, a facilities engineer, is up a ladder changing a light bulb. As he is doing this, two children and their mother, looking rather upset, try to enter through a side entrance. All three are clothed, but still dripping a little from their time at the beach, with sand occasionally falling from their clothes and hair.

When the maintenance engineer spots them, he steps off the ladder and walks over, opening the door for them so they don't have to deal with it any further and giving them a nice greeting as well. As he asks about their time at the beach, he goes with them in the elevator and even presses the button for the floor they're going to since no one has a free hand except the kids, who don't and are very young. (read: short) to achieve it.

When I submit this scenario to customer service training sessions I run, my attendees tell me they think this response is “very good, maybe even great.” But the problem with it is, as my customer service training participants noted, a answer, what would i call reactive customer service. Which means it's missing in one way: The customer had to request service — in this case, she asked for it through the obvious gesture of wrestling with the handle on the side door — and only when she did did the employee answer.

Obviously, this level of service is better than No. service, which would be if a customer were to ask for something and be ignored, refused, or answered unkindly. However, there is a higher step to which service can be increased, which I call predictive customer service.

Predictive customer service directly evokes emotions that are more likely to lead to customer loyalty; it gets there faster and more directly than reactive customer service ever could.

So let's run the script again. There is a maintenance engineer up a ladder changing a light bulb, and a mother and children are approaching the side entrance (clear glass). In this version of the scenario, even before mom has a chance to start playing with the door handle, the maintenance engineer is already opening the door and welcoming them. the service. The difference between these two scenarios is only a few seconds. However, the second, where the engineer steps down the ladder and proactively heads for the door, is the version that will bring back a guest again and again because, in a small but significant way, it has touched hearts.

Related: 5 Shocking Customer Service Mistakes You're Making Every Day

Now, it is not fair to say that in advance customer service it costs no more than reactive, although the cost is not visible. It requires training, inspiration and, often, staff growth to achieve it. So why go to all the work it takes to become a consistently upfront organization with its customers? One of the few remaining competitive advantages in the market is this opportunity to rise to the highest level of customer service, serving a want or need that customers have not even asked for or asked for yet.

Before we go any further, why wouldn't customers be asking for something they need, benefit from, or express a question whose answer would be important to them? Here are the main reasons:

One, they don't want to be bothered. I know when you've worked with challenging clients all day, it's going to be hard for you to believe me on this, but some clients don't want to appear demanding, don't want to make a fuss, or are shy by nature. in public settings.

Second, they may not know enough about what you have to offer to ask for the right thing. This may be due to a lack of market research or – more often – because you you are an expert on your offers and the exceptions that can be made individually, but just aren't.

And a third, more alarming reason is that they are unhappy enough to put you off for future work, knowing that the cost of switching brands these days in most markets is very easy if they want to seek better service elsewhere.

Related: The 3 levels of customer service (and how to get to the top)

It requires an investment, human and possibly financial, to become an organization that succeeds in providing advance customer service. It helps if you emphasize empathic traits when you are developing and setting your hiring criteria. It helps even more if you encourage, as The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company does, an “antennas out” approach, where your entire team tunes in to notice things that would be hard to see if they were always on. doubled to work in their functions. tasks and, finally, requires adequate personnel. One person generally can't really do the work of two in a proactive manner, although great processes and tech support can get you close.

Perhaps most importantly, proactive customer service takes your business out of the dangerous and unprofitable commodity zone, where customers consider your business to be interchangeable with the competition. This is especially valuable in today's market as it is among the few competitive advantages available to many businesses. Of course, if you have a unique product or service offering, you have another way to escape commoditization. But most of our companies and offerings are not as unique as we think they are. Or this uniqueness is not visible to customers, such as advance customer service. With upfront customer service, you're showing them your true colors—and they're some really bright and shiny colors.