You can make almost any service upscale

I just wanted to follow-up on Thursday's post regarding Total Customer Experience.

The September 2006 Entrepreneur Magazine had a piece about C & M Moving and Storage, "white-glove movers." They're a Houston-based company offering specialty moving services to customers with artwork or high-priced furniture.

If movers can go "upscale," aren't there ways to make your legal services more upscale (and profit greatly from it)?

A quote from the piece, "luxury consumers are not lacking in material goods, and they also frequently look for what I call luxury experiences." I think this is applicable to the practice of law. Clearly not all aspects of a practice. Some legal work is hard slug-it-out stuff where a client needs to be in the trenches with you. However, the example I go back to is the boring/bland real estate closing. I think some clients want to make one phone call telling you they want to sell their home and that's it. They want to be hands-off. They want a nice package of documents post-closing not just some slip-shop old envelope of things. They want more than the correct result. Great customer service feels good, right?

I know I often miss this point being cheap and almost too logical. I'm overly analytical and just see some of these extras as "fluff." But a lot of people want to pay for the fluff. I was just down at a conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, FL...nice place. I think the subject of this post is analogous to the turn-down service at the Ritz. I think it's "fluff" and I'd never pay for it myself. But lots of people want to pay for those little chocolates and vases of flowers!