An excerpt from The Simple Truths of Service by Ken Blanchard and Barbara Glanz

Great service is not an accident. It starts by deciding what kind of experience you want your customers to have – a clear vision.

In the early 1970s when everybody was going to self-service gasoline stations, my coauthor Sheldon Bowles said, “What a fabulous time to go to full service. There will be no competition.” So he and his partners developed a full-service gas station called Domo Gas. They knew that if people had a choice, they certainly wouldn’t choose to come to a gas station. They also knew that when customers did come, they wanted to get in and out as quickly as possible. The unique customer service vision that Sheldon and his partners imagined was an Indianapolis 500 pit stop.

All the attendants at Domo Gas were dressed up in red jumpsuits.

If you drove into a Domo gas station, two or three people would race out of the hut to your car. Somebody would look under the hood, somebody would clean the windows, and somebody would start pumping gas. As Sheldon and his partners rolled out this vision in more than 150 stations across Western Canada, they killed the competition.

A gas station in northern California heard about this vision and went one step further. After serving a customer, they would hand that person a little brochure about their service that said, “P.S. We also sell gas.”

Having a clear vision of great service is the key.