You strive to provide your customers with excellent service. But does it qualify as “award winning”? It will if you follow the advice of Brian Hill, service manager at Leisure Tyme RV in Mary Esther, Fla. The company recently received a prestigious service quality award from Newmar Corp., a manufacturer of motor homes that Leisure Tyme sells and services.

Here are seven easy-to-apply secrets that helped Leisure Tyme win this award:

1. Treat customers like family. “Treating customers like family is our whole philosophy,” Hill says. “We think of our dealings with customers more as personal relationships than business arrangements. We understand their cares and concerns, and we will even suffer a loss in profit if that’s what it takes to satisfy our customers.”
2. Help them feel at home. “We want our customers to be just as comfortable doing business with us as they would feel in their own home relaxing at the end of a workday,” Hill says. “That’s why every employee at Leisure Tyme greets customers promptly, smiles at them and asks ‘How are you doing today?’”
3. Make even the unpleasant as pleasant as possible. “There’s nothing recreational or fun about bringing in your RV for servicing. It’s a necessary evil,” Hill admits. “So we make the service experience as pleasurable as possible. We’re here to exceed expectations.” Employees at Leisure Tyme offer service customers much more than they expect to receive. When customers come to pick up their motor homes, they discover they’ve been cleaned and polished as well as serviced. Employees also bring any extra problems they found to customers’ attention, rather than just taking care of the service issues.
4. Be willing to take a new or unusual approach to solving a customer’s problem instead of doing everything by the book. For example, if a customer calls Leisure Tyme with a service problem, employees could just say “You will have to bring your vehicle in.” But whenever possible, employees will try to walk customers through a simple fix over the phone so that they can take care of the problem on their own. “A lot of service centers won’t do that. They’d just tell the customer to bring the RV in,” says Hill. “Once a gentleman was having an electrical problem and didn’t have time to make it to our place before we closed. Instead of just telling him to come in the next day, we walked him through the steps of fixing the problem. This got him through the weekend so he didn’t have to disrupt his vacation to get the work done. He was so grateful that he sent us a nice letter,” Hill recalls.
5. Remember that all customers are created equal. At Leisure Tyme, the employees treat all their customers with the same level of courtesy, whether or not the customers bought their RVs from Leisure Tyme. “Every customer deserves the same level of satisfaction they’d get from their hometown dealer, and we try to give them that,” says Hill. “Our customers are often so appreciative that they give us a hug rather than just shake our hand.”
6. Give them the full story. When customers come in to shop for a new RV, Leisure Tyme staffers tell them there are no stupid questions. “We stay with them until they have all the answers they need to make a purchase decision,” says Hill.
7. Take advantage of every opportunity to serve your customers. “We host an annual steak dinner for all our customers at a local campsite. Employees set up, cook and clean up. Participation is totally voluntary, but everyone is happy to be involved,” says Hill. The customers who attend those annual dinners are always awed by the dedication of Leisure Tyme employees. The experience serves as a tried-and-true loyalty builder for new and old customers alike.