So how do we go the extra mile without handing a stranger the keys to your company ' s vault?
START WITH THE MINDSET
Mother Teresa once said, " We can ' t all do great things, but we can do small things with great love."
That ' s a good way to think about service excellence. It ' s rarely the big, heroic gesture that wows a customer on a single call; creating that kind of moment on every call, for every agent, is hard to sustain. It ' s the accumulation of small things, done consistently, and done well. Such as:
• Playing pleasant hold music.
• Using the CRM software to gather upto-date information on the customer.
• Setting and complying with hold time limits.
• Practicing greetings and closings until the tone feels warm and genuine; the kind that makes a customer comfortable calling back if they need to.
None of these actions look like " the extra mile " on their own. But together they shape whether an agent has the time, tools, and support to deliver something great, or whether they ' re set up to struggle before they even log in for their shift.
BUILD IT IN, DON ' T LEAVE IT TO CHANCE
Above-average service isn ' t an accident, and it isn ' t just a matter of hiring people with the right attitude and hoping for the best. It ' s a deliberate design choice, built across four main areas.
1. Ensuring Products That Meet Customers ' Expectations
The company ' s offering( s) has to hold up. When they don’ t, that ' s when the understandably disappointed and frustrated customers call in.
No amount of agent goodwill can make up for a product that fails on the basics, and when a company knows about the failure and doesn ' t fix it, the burden lands squarely on customer service.
CUSTOMER SERVICE WEEK
ABOVE-AVERAGE SERVICE ISN ' T AN ACCIDENT, AND IT ISN ' T JUST A MATTER OF HIRING PEOPLE WITH THE RIGHT ATTITUDE AND HOPING FOR THE BEST.
Last December, I ordered my daughter a hoodie for Christmas; right color, right size, with her standing next to me to make sure we got it right.
We selected everything correctly, but when we reached the payment page, the site silently changed the size to whatever it had in stock.
Unfortunately, we didn ' t catch it in the moment. The confirmation email that landed in my inbox showed the truth: right color, wrong size. A week later, the hoodie arrived but two sizes too big, exactly as the receipt had warned, if we ' d caught it sooner.
Here ' s what should have happened. If the size we wanted wasn ' t available in that color, the product page should have told us that upfront, before we ever paid; not swap it silently at checkout and hope we didn ' t notice.
After some digging, I found reviews describing the same problem, so this wasn ' t a one-time glitch. It was a known flaw in the site ' s inventory handling.
I reached out to customer service. They were polite and did what they could: sent a return label, had me drop the package at the post office, and told me I could reorder once the return was received.
A week later, the return arrived, and I placed a new order; right size, but now a different color, since the original was gone. But by the time the second hoodie showed up, Christmas had passed.
The company knew about the checkout glitch. It was sitting in their own reviews. But they left it unfixed, which meant their customer service team spent the holiday season fielding a problem the product team could have solved with one line of code.
That ' s not agent goodwill failing; that ' s a company asking its service team to apologize for something it chose not to fix.
2. Establishing and Following Effective Processes
This is where the extra mile either becomes safe to give or turns into a liability. Here are several critical processes to consider implementing:
• Defined hold time limits.
• A real escalation path.
• And critically, a good recovery process for what happens when something goes wrong, such as a package being delivered to the wrong address. It turns a mistake into a moment that builds trust. It also protects the agent, who isn ' t left improvising alone under pressure.
Authentication belongs here too. And it ' s worth being specific about. A caller stuck on hold for 15 minutes digging up a Social Security number isn ' t proof your protocol is thorough; it ' s proof it ' s badly designed. The fix isn ' t loosening it, and it isn ' t making the caller suffer through it either. Instead, it ' s building an authentication process that ' s fast and secure.
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