Clients often equate a higher level of service with a higher account minimum, people in the industry say.

WSJ: Do You Make the Asset Cut?

About five years ago, Rackspace introduced a higher level of service, Intensive Proactive Managed Support, with more outsourced IT functionality an alternative to its basic Managed Online Demand hosting service.

FORBES: Rackspace: Bull and Bear Cases Revisited

But when they set out to improve their customer satisfaction and customer loyalty scores, they started in-house: by empowering employees to engage more fully with customers and deliver a higher level of service than they could previously.

FORBES: From Customer Management To Customer Engagement

Mr. Trusov says companies "would need to make sure the customer service level is much higher" than that on a website or in a physical store.

WSJ: Merchants Push Sales Through Social Media

These forms are then vetted by the recruiting service center and routed to higher level managers for approvals.

FORBES: What Happened to Human Resources?

"From 2013 onwards, savers and investors will be told how much financial advice costs, will understand the type of service they are paying for, and will benefit from a higher level of professional standards from their advisers, " the FSA said.

BBC: FSA publishes guide to financial advice charges

The states are ceding many blocking powers, but in return for new ones from the federal level, particularly in higher education, the penal system and civil-service law.

ECONOMIST: German reform

Its unconventional business model is using the transformational power of the Cloud to provide a new level of service that allows companies to keep their legacy CRM and data management systems, while providing a higher level of customer insight and engagement.

FORBES: A Better Way to Manage the Customer Journey