How To Develop a White-Glove Customer Service Strategy

Excellent customer service goes beyond answering customer emails or resolving complaints. Top-notch customer service means anticipating customers’ needs and ensuring they feel like your top priority.

This is called white-glove customer service—the crème de la crème of customer support. This impeccable service can help brands cultivate customer loyalty and gain a competitive advantage over competitors.

Ahead, learn about what white-glove customer service is and how you can implement it at your ecommerce company.

What is white-glove customer service?

White-glove customer service is when a company provides high-level assistance to customers, going above and beyond to meet their needs. White-glove service staff are meticulous in their care and highly skilled, and they offer personalized assistance that ensures a premium experience with a brand.

Ecommerce businesses can implement white-glove customer service at any point along the customer journey, from browsing to delivery. For example, an apparel retailer could implement a personal styling service for customers browsing the brand’s product options. A furniture company could offer post-purchase setup as part of a white-glove delivery service.

Incorporating white-glove customer service into your business can help you distinguish your brand from competitors. Since white-glove customer service can elevate the customer experience and heighten customer satisfaction, it can also, in turn, positively impact your company’s retention rate and eventually help you build brand loyalty. 

How to develop a white-glove customer service experience

1. Identify areas for improvement
2. Prepare your staff with proper training
3. Offer direct channels of communication
4. Collect customer feedback
5. Create a personalized customer journey

If you’d like your brand to incorporate white-glove customer service, here are a few helpful tips:

1. Identify areas for improvement

Look at key performance indicators (KPIs) to identify areas along the customer journey where you can improve. For example, suppose you run an ecommerce bedding company and you notice a high cart abandonment rate. You might decide to provide white-glove consultation services to build customer confidence toward completing their purchases.

White-glove service strategies will increase costs for your business, so get clear on your budget and how you’ll measure return on investment (ROI). For example, let’s say you’re considering two strategies for your bedding company: offering customers a design consultation or offering complimentary monograms on pillowcases. If the cost of each service is roughly the same, you might try both and see which drives more conversions.

2. Prepare your staff with proper training

To ensure exceptional customer service, you’ll need a skilled, passionate customer support team. They should be able to adeptly respond to customer concerns, demonstrate empathy, provide tailored solutions, and offer an overall personalized experience.

To build this expertise, invest in specialized customer service training for your support staff. Providing premium hospitality training can help your reps elevate their service to the next level. Training them on techniques like positive scripting—a customer service technique that emphasizes affirmative language and focuses on solutions rather than limitations.

You may also invest in equipping your reps with detailed product and industry knowledge so they can provide a consultative sales experience. For example, if you run an ecommerce home goods company you could provide staff with interior design training, so they can help customers select the right objects for their space. This kind of intensive training can help you make sure your staff not only meets, but exceeds customer expectations.

3. Offer direct channels of communication

Show your customers that you’re there for them—and that you value what they have to say—by offering direct channels of communication. You can communicate directly with customers in a variety of places, such as online chats, on the phone, via email, or through direct messages on social media.

Make sure to tell customers where they can reach you, and respond to customer inquiries in a timely fashion. If you don’t have the support staff to immediately respond to every inquiry, be sure to manage customer expectations by clearly stating when customers can expect a response.

4. Collect customer feedback

As you develop white-glove customer service at your company, collect customer feedback to gauge your customer service quality and learn how you can improve. This can also make customers feel valued, since you’re going out of your way to listen to their voices.

You can do this by sending surveys and questionnaires to recent buyers. Ask how they would rate their customer service experience, and ask how those customer service interactions could be improved. You can use metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer effort score (CES) to streamline the feedback collection process.

5. Create a personalized customer journey

White-glove customer service excels at making customers feel appreciated and valued as individual consumers. In practice, white-glove customer service means personalization and customization throughout the customer journey. This can pay off. Some 57% of customers will spend more on a brand that personalizes their experience, according to a study by communications company Twilio.

For example, if a customer purchases a product requiring assembly, you might send them a follow-up email offering a live call for installation help. Additionally, use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to track customer data and record each customers’ past customer service inquiries so that reps can be sure to address those concerns in future interactions.

Examples of white-glove customer service

White-glove customer service will look different at every company. Here are a few ecommerce examples:

Framebridge

The ecommerce art framing brand Framebridge offers consultations with designers, who help buyers lay out gallery walls. In this example of highly customized white-glove service, Framebridge team members take each customer’s art, style, and space into consideration as they create their designs.

The service promises one-on-one collaboration and unlimited rounds of back-and-forth. At the end of the process, customers receive a PDF guide for hanging their newly designed gallery wall alongside hanging hardware and exact measurements to guide each object’s placement. The service costs $99, but Framebridge credits the cost when customers make a purchase.

Jean Dousset

Luxury jewelry brand Jean Dousset, which specializes in lab-grown diamonds, offers customers a white-glove shopping experience via consultations in its Los Angeles showroom or in 50-minute virtual consultations. During in-person appointments, customers can try on popular styles and see a selection of loose diamonds to understand the range of options the brand offers. This can help customers build confidence and feel cared for as they consider making a big-ticket purchase.