Many business owners take pride in their service and are personally involved in delighting their customers. While this can be a powerful competitive advantage, it's difficult to maintain as your company scales.

An inevitable consequence of growth (particularly exponential growth) is the cannibalisation of your attention by new responsibilities. It won't be possible to allocate the same proportion of your personal capacity to the things that you used to prioritise when your business was much smaller and simpler.

The logical solution is to grow your team and delegate the service activities that you once personally fulfilled to specialist professionals. However, that's easier said than done, not least because of the challenges and complexities introduced by Price's Law.

Companies that successfully scale without compromising their service standards often invest heavily in culture, leadership, recruitment and training. Fortunately, there are also some tactics that can be implemented quickly and without much cost.

Case in point: researchers from France, Germany, Switzerland and the USA found that displaying photos of customer service personnel can raise perceptions of service quality amongst people who haven't made a purchase yet. This shouldn't be too surprising, since one would expect a humanisation effect.

Of real curiosity, though, is that this tactic also increases service perceptions and staff ratings amongst customers when recalling their experience. In other words, it literally changes peoples' memories, even if the actual service is exactly the same.

If you compete on service, then this is a very simple tactic that you can implement almost immediately by adding photos of your service team to your website, email signatures, and other marketing assets.

(I suspect that doing so may have the added benefit of improving employee accountability by literally putting a face to your customers' service experiences and eliminating employee anonymity).