Start by mapping what already happens, not by drafting. List the contact points in the order a VIP client meets them, name who is present at each and what the client receives there, and the gaps become visible. The first version of the standard closes those gaps, and nothing more.
Quick Overview
What you’ll learn:
- Why the mapping exercise comes before any drafting, and what it surfaces
- How to word a response-time clause so somebody actually owns it
- What routing has to look like to survive an account manager’s holiday
- The client-data clause most first drafts leave out
Who this article is for:
- Key account managers and service coordinators
- Sales and service leads writing a standard for the first time
- Teams configuring a case management system and needing the values to enter
Reading time: 7 minutes
Map Before You Draft
A map of today’s journey does what a draft cannot: it shows which commitments you are already failing. Walk the contact points in sequence — enquiry, proposal, onboarding, change request, complaint, renewal — noting who is present at each and what the client gets. The defects come out in a pair of shapes: points with nobody accountable, and points where the client waits without information.
Separate them, because the fixes differ. An unowned point needs a name against it; a silent point needs a message somebody is obliged to send. Neither requires a policy on tone of voice or gifting, and a first version attempting all of that will not be read.
The map also hands you the test the rest of the document must pass, and the FAQ below sets it out. In short: an attitude leaves no trace in a ticket, while an event either happened within the stated window or it did not — so write about events and the responses they are owed.
Word the Response-Time Clause So Somebody Owns It
Response times go wrong in a particular way: published as a selling point before anybody worked out how they would be measured. A figure in a pitch deck has no calendar behind it, no definition of which cases it covers, and nobody whose job changes when it is exceeded. It becomes real when a client cites it back — by which point the conversation is a complaint, not a service decision.
Case management platforms word it the other way round, and the wording is worth borrowing. The service level agreement documentation on learn.microsoft.com treats first response time and resolution time as values defined in configuration: bound to entry conditions that decide which cases the target applies to, to a business-hours calendar, to actions fired as the deadline approaches, and to actions fired once it is missed. Every one of those four parts has a counterpart in a written clause.
Borrow that structure. A clause worth signing states its scope, its measurement window, its target, its warning point and its fallback — who owns the case once the window closes. The fallback is what organisations are least ready to fill in, and a clause without it buys nothing.
Make Routing Survive an Absence
Picture the case the standard exists for: a VIP client emails their account manager, who is on leave, about a change they consider urgent. In most organisations that mail sits in a personal mailbox until somebody returns. No amount of politeness in the document prevents this.
What prevents it is a routing construct. The queue documentation on learn.microsoft.com describes a queue as the holding place a case sits in until somebody takes ownership — which is precisely the thing a hand-written standard leaves undefined when it says a request should reach “the right person”. Name the queue, name who owns the queue, and the holiday case resolves itself.
Queues work only if somebody stands behind them, which is why the standard carries names rather than titles. Write each accountability as a person with a deputy, and state what the deputy receives: open requests, promises already made, and where both are recorded. Deputising that lives in a conversation does not outlast it.
A different rule applies when the trigger is on your side and affects a whole set of clients — a release that broke an integration, a supplier outage, a migration that ran long. The service incident management model published by salesforce.com treats the incident as its own record with client requests attached, and communicates at incident level rather than per request. Add one obligation for key accounts: the outbound message goes first, from a named person, through a listed channel.
Write the Client-Data Clause
Look at where a VIP relationship is actually recorded and the problem announces itself. Contracts and invoices sit in systems of record. Everything that makes the relationship feel personal — which stakeholder wants decisions in writing and which by phone, an allergy mentioned once before a dinner — lives wherever the account manager happened to put it. Most first drafts say nothing about that second category.
Three of the principles in Article 5 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 on eur-lex.europa.eu bear on it directly. Purpose limitation asks what a note is for, which rules out keeping observations because they might one day prove useful. Minimisation asks whether this particular detail is needed for that purpose. Storage limitation asks when it stops being kept. Answer those three per category of note, add which system holds it and who may read it, and the clause is finished.
Both costs land in the same place. When the person holding those notes moves on, their successor restarts the relationship and the client notices. When a request for access or erasure arrives, nobody can search a mailbox nobody else can open. One clause removes both exposures, which is why it belongs in the first version rather than a later annex.
Read Also
- Premium customer service: standards in the luxury segment — wider segment context
- Customer experience: mapping the customer journey — the mapping method in detail
- Handling customer complaints in a way that builds trust — after a missed commitment
Build Your Skills
This topic is developed in the Professional customer service: training for salespeople and Effective customer service: building a positive experience courses. The first addresses the client conversation on the sales side; the second works on the service process and on difficult situations. Contact us to match the scope to where your team is.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How do you write a VIP standard so that it can actually be applied?
Test it backwards. Take a request that closed last month, read the draft beside the ticket history, and see whether it lets you say who owed what and whether they delivered. Anything written about attitude leaves no trace in a ticket and fails; anything written about an event and the response owed to it passes.
Should the standard publish specific response times?
Only alongside the machinery that makes one measurable. Borrowing the structure from the service level agreement documentation on learn.microsoft.com, a figure needs a scope, a measurement window, a warning point and somebody who inherits the case once the window closes. Inheritance is what organisations hesitate over — and a figure published without it still gets quoted back during a complaint.
Who should own escalation?
Somebody whose name appears in the document, with somebody who covers for them. A short set of accountabilities is enough: the relationship and promises made inside it, the movement of a request between teams, and the case whose window has closed. Small organisations may put all of them on one person, provided the cover and handover record are written down.
Can we keep informal notes about what a client likes?
Yes, with the Article 5 questions from Regulation (EU) 2016/679 on eur-lex.europa.eu answered in advance: what the note is for, whether the detail is needed for that, and when it stops being kept. Keep it where a colleague can search it, because both failure modes are the same failure — a successor who cannot find it, and an access request you cannot answer.