🌟 5-star service examples

A tip I regularly tell clients is: Think beyond a 5-star service.

One of my favourite exercises, and an exercise that often leads to the extremely useful insights among my clients, centres around identifying what we would do if marketing was no longer possible and we had to rely solely on referrals.

What would a 5-star service look like? How about 6-stars?

I first learned about this some years ago in a podcast episode from Masters Of Scale with Reid Hoffman (founder of PayPal and LinkedIn) and Brian Chesky (founder of AirBnb). Here is a quick summary article of the major lessons of that episode written by Reid himself, and further down this email is Brian explaining it in a 2 minute video.

The lesson fundamentally changed how I approached business, and it has gone on to help me and my clients achieve rapid, but fundamentally stable and consistent, growth.

Why am I mentioning this now? How can you do this?

I own another business, an environmental social enterprise called ZeroSmart, that takes me around 1 hour per month to run. My partner mostly runs that business, and it takes her roughly 2 hours per week. Much of the business is automated. One of the main things we do now is tweak and update our existing systems to improve them, and recently we updated our order confirmation email based on one of my favourite examples of a 5-star service: CDBaby.

CDBaby 5-star email example. It is memorable, with real personality but a feeling of quality. This email helped create a viral referral loop for CDBaby.

Despite ZeroSmart being a primarily digital service, and despite our extremely low time inputs, we can still create 5-star+ touchpoints for clients.

By brainstorming what it looks like to deliver something beyond 5-stars, we could identify low-cost things we could do to improve service quality (in this case, simply improving our order confirmation email).

Offering beyond 5-stars was a guiding principle when I helped my client 10x their income in 8 weeks (a social media marketing agency).

It is also something we have implemented with other clients, like Jen (PhD dissertation coach) who now often sends a small gift to new customers, some nice teabags along with a welcome pack. It adds a physical element to a service and has really helped with improving perceived value and referral rates. That ~$7 cost has led to $thousands$ in referrals.

Delivering a 5-star service doesn’t have to take a lot of time or money, it can be as simple as giving regular updates, remembering an important date, or including a tiny gift.

What simple thing could you do today that will help your customers say “Wow!”?

Brian Chesky - designing a 10-star guest experience (2 minutes)

Video with my client, Calvin: How absorbing the lessons on a 5-star service had helped his business (2 minutes)

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-august-28-2024

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