That quality is a commodity is no big secret. But affluent customers also expect high-level service, and sometimes good just isn't good enough.
For Paul Sullivan, president of the Boston–area Sullivan Co., exceptional service begins with managing the customer's experience. “Anyone can hire a carpenter who knows how to frame a wall,” Sullivan says. “It's about managing your projects and your clients.”
Although it's not always possible to meet every deadline, Sullivan can ensure that he presents a polite and well-scrubbed crew, and that they keep the jobsite as clean as possible. “Our mantra is, ‘Treat the client's home better than you treat your own.'”
Sullivan's crews seal off work areas with plastic ZipWalls. In apartment buildings, they lay carpet protector all the way from the elevator to the door. They'll do anything to keep a site clean and to minimize disruptions — even muffling a drill with half a basketball.
That attention to detail doesn't end with the job. Sullivan has helped a client who'd locked himself out of the house on a Saturday evening, and has shoveled snow off a client's roof — at midnight.
Mark Brady, a Hartford–based kitchen remodeler, says he tries to manage the customer experience in such a way that he consistently exceeds expectations. For a time, he even hired a stretch limousine to ferry clients to showrooms on day-long selection trips.
Brady was inspired, he says, by the white-glove treatment lavished on his family when the Make-A-Wish Foundation granted his son's wish: a trip to Disney World. “It was just such an all-encompassing, expectation-exceeding experience, and I thought, ‘How can I do something like that in my business?',” Brady says.
He has since toned down the luxury, but the shopping trips are still a central part of his process. Now he drives clients himself in his SUV. He still goes to great lengths to wow his customers, once driving a couple all the way from Hartford to New York City for a shopping trip. “The limo was a cool idea,” Brady says, “but the most important thing is that the shopping trips work. My clients get better products with less fooling around.”