Service Please!


When the founder of Lindberg, Henrik Lindberg was speaking at the OSA conference years ago, someone asked him what is the secret of the best practices he sees across the world and his answer was: “Service. Service. Service.” He didn’t say ‘good service’. He literally said ‘Service. Service. Service.’ The emphasis is totally different.

Acceptable, adequate, good, professional service and ‘wow’ levels of service are oceans apart and completely different things. Never mix them up. I have no interest in delivering ‘good’ service in my practice. In a word, I expect us to deliver ‘wow’. Anything less is falling short.

Here’s the thing. It’s not very hard to deliver wow levels of service. You’re a human being. You know what makes people feel good. You know what human beings want. You just need to care enough to do it everytime no matter what. I could argue it’s easier than delivering just good service because when you wow people your clients are nicer, more understanding, more patient, more appreciative, and everything feels easier because you are not dealing with the chaos of disappointing people, dealing with unhappy and demanding clients, fixing endless problems that we brought on ourselves, and living with a negative energy in the practice. Just wowing the client in the beginning is easier.

At the heart of wow is caring. You have to actually give a crap about how the person in front of you is feeling – what concerns they have, what preferences they have, what problems they are trying to solve, how they like to be treated – and helping them has to be your primary thought. Every time. With every client. To wow your clients you have to care more. And you have to know what human beings care about and design your service to deliver all of it.

The most value I can be of to you is to change how you think. To change your mindset. If I can change how you think about your business, you will arrive at different conclusions, take different actions and end up with a different destination for your practice than where your old thinking was taking you. To step up your service in your practice to the highest, highest, highest levels possible, it starts with how you and your team THINK about service and what it is and what it means. Talking about delivering wow, making their day, being the highlight of their week – all these things convey what we are really talking about and what the standards are.

When you do it this way your clients are swept off their feet by the accumulation of little things that you do, and the obvious and genuine care you have for them, they forget their troubles and are transported to a different place in their mind, they relax and they open up and they show you the best of themselves. Being able to do this every day for every client is an amazing feeling that will make your staff fall in love with their work and want to give the very best of themselves to doing it.