It’s the big things that are easy to spot – find out why the small things are so important to the big picture. Pick-up, driver knows the way, on-time arrival. That’s the baseline. It’s everything else that makes a good chauffeur service great. Small details. Unglamorous ones. Worth talking about.
The night before’s confirmation email. Not a marketing email. A brief note: time, car, driver. Takes thirty seconds to send. Eliminates a type of anxiety for the recipient. The single gesture is a sign of intent before the driver leaves home.
Picking up passengers from arrivals, not the kerb. Sounds minor. Isn’t. A passenger arriving after a four-hour delay, with luggage, who doesn’t know where to find a car in the loading zone at Norwich Airport, needs to see a name board and a human face – not to have to search for a car in the loading zone while their phone battery runs out. The difference between the two scenarios is between a returning passenger and a lost passenger.
Temperature. This sounds trivial. It isn’t. A car that’s been sitting at 5am in the cold and dark to pick up a passenger for a flight should be warm. A car in the middle of July should be cool. These changes are a few minutes of planning. They speak in silence of the driver’s preparation for the trip.
Knowing when not to talk. This is greatly under-estimated. Some want to talk. Many don’t. A good driver knows this – after thirty seconds at most – and acts accordingly. Silence is a service, not a problem, in the workplace. Great drivers know this.
Route transparency matters too. When the passenger asks “why are we taking this route?” he or she should get a confident response. Not defensiveness. Not a mutter about the sat-nav. Norfolk drivers can explain their actions, which inspires confidence even when it doesn’t make sense to the back-seat driver.
These facts don’t make it into the brochures. They add up, unnoticed, to customer loyalty.
“I don’t know how to describe it,” said a regular Norwich client. “Everything just works.”
Everything just works. That’s what every good chauffeur company delivers, and cannot wholly fake. It has to be earned, a little at a time, trip by trip.