Having a great product doesn’t give you an automatic sale in business – you could have the best product in the world, but if you haven’t got great staff, facilities and a good customer service ethic, your customer may go elsewhere.

Buying a car is an exciting and, often, expensive process for consumers, so they want to feel like you value their custom. The experience surrounding a sale is often the difference between a customer coming to you or going to one of your competitors.

Andrew McMillan, the former head of customer service at John Lewis, has referred to the“random acts of kindness” that a business can carry out to make service “legendary”, but there need not be anything random about them.

Here are 10 of the best:

1: A free breakfast for car customers

What better way to treat a valued customer than to feed them well. Kinghams, a 55-year-old dealership in the heart of Croydon, offers its customers a free breakfast while they wait for work to be carried out on their car.

Kinghams formed a partnership with a local bistro to provide breakfast and drink at an agreed fixed sum per customer. Managing director Keith Kingham said: “Customers can enjoy a free breakfast of their choice, while being welcomed like long-lost friends. The bistro acts, in a way, like an extension of our own business model, with high standards.” The initiative was launched two years ago and is going incredibly well, according to Kinghams.

Costs are small when set against the lifetime spend of its loyal band of well nourished customers, but benefits are huge, with increased customer goodwill, reduced costs of collection and delivery and savings in parking charges and penalties.

“Not only has the arrangement meant that we are able to turn cars around more quickly, it has produced a uniqueness that our loyal customer genuinely enjoy,” said  Kingham.

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