In Strategy+Business, recently, there was a great article on “The Luxury Touch” by by Robert Reppa and Evan Hirsh. They suggest four things that luxury brands have to consistently get right in order to differentiate themselves from the also rans:
“Although there’s no single process for achieving high levels of customer satisfaction, four principles are common to nearly all top-performing luxury brand companies:
- They create a customer-centered culture that identifies, nurtures, and reinforces service as a primary value.
- They use a rigorous selection process to populate the organization with superior sales and support staff. The impulse to care about accommodating customers cannot be taught to people who are not predisposed to it.
- They constantly retrain employees to perpetuate organizational values and to help them attain greater mastery of products and procedures.
- They systematically measure and reward customer-centric behavior and excellence in sales and service to enforce high standards and reinforce expectations.
When these four principles are at work, the result is a highly integrated business model that combines a superior product line with outstanding sales and service quality, driving strong growth and profitability in the process.”
Read the full article here.