Service Guarantee

The 18th century entrepreneur Josiah Wedgewood pioneered the satisfaction-or-money-back guarantee as a marketing strategy on the entire range of his pottery products. He took advantage of his guarantee offer to send his products to rich clientele across Europe unsolicited.

The benefits of your practice providing a service guarantee to clients are as follows:

• Forces your practice to focus on clients’ wants and expectations in every aspect of the service.
• Guarantees established clear standards which create a common image of what your practice stands for in both the clients and employees’ minds.
• Motivates employees and principals to focus on quality and client service due to the costs involved in not doing so.
• Guarantees to help clients to reduce risk in making purchase decisions and to reinforce their long-term loyalty.

To be effective the practice service guarantees must be easy to understand and communicate so that clients can have clear awareness of the benefits of the guarantees. In addition, the guarantee must be important to the clients, provide adequate values to offset service failure, easy to take advantage of, and be credible.

For example, a practice offering monthly fixed fee bundled small business services could guarantee to refund the client’s monthly fees if they are not delighted with the service. This reduces the client’s risk in trying a new practice service to zero. This strategy is successfully used by Netflix and the other pay TV services.