Learning

Customer Service to Service Quality

Introduction

Kate Dickens has over 17 years experience working in the UAE with multinationals, national banking institutions and management consultancies in the fields of Multi-Cultural Customer Service, Service Quality and Business Excellence. In 2007 Kate won the Emirates Business Woman of the Year for Professional & Career Achievements. Kate is a published author and has just completed her second book on Service Excellence.

 

Customer service is about maintaining the status quo and providing a standard offering designed to meet the basic needs and expectations of all customers in a particular market. Whereas Service Excellence is about taking the customer experience to an unparalleled level by   undertaking customer profiling to determine the different customer segments within the company's market. Establishing individual value propositions for each of these customer segments before developing  a tailored customer service programme based on the customer benefits (or Value Moments) prized by that particular customer segment.

Service Excellence is a strategy that encompasses the whole organisation and delivers three desirable conditions: smoother operations, employee loyalty and customer loyalty. This requires investment in both time and resources as well as funding, rather than merely sending employees on traditional customer services training. Delivering Service Excellence requires 100% endorsement and commitment from senior management. Only when leaders are fully engaged will they be able to create a culture of service excellence where world class performance is achieved.

Since writing my last book "Serve Them Right", an introductory book on how to develop and implement a customer service framework ten years ago, there have been significant developments in the fields of customer service and service quality due to the considerable amount of international research in customer experience management and business excellence.

So when I was approached by IIR, a leading international seminar and training provider to develop a series of distance learning modules, "From Customer Service to Service Excellence", I decided to use my research as a basis for a sequel to my earlier work and focus on the methodology for organisational transition to service excellence utilising the findings from the latest international research.   The plan is to publish the book during Customer Service Week later this year.

One of the commonest and deadliest mistakes in Service Excellence is the failure to interact with  customers from the various customer segments on a regular basis. Only by consulting your customers can you ensure the business strategy is aligned to their varying needs and expectations. All too frequently companies assume they know what their customers want, that new technology can replace a human intervention or they simply reproduce a  competitor's product or service without actually obtaining feedback from their own customer base.

Known as the perception gaps, the five most common are the gap between what your company thinks the customers want and what they actually want; what the company thinks the customer bought and what he thinks he received, the service quality gap between the service offered and the customer's expectations and finally the gap between the value proposition that has been marketed and your actual delivery.

In essence, obtaining feedback once a year via the annual customer satisfaction survey is not enough. As unfortunately by that time many of your customers would have defected to another supplier.

Certainly for the hospitality sector, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company is an excellent example of an organisation were  the senior management are fully focussed on delivering  excellence through continual improvement  of  their products and services, and where employees are empowered to delight customers, or effectively handle customer complaints, problems and incidents. Every employee from the general manager to the porters are trained and expected to handle complaints and they all have the same authority and budget to do so, $2,000 per complaint.

In the retail sector, the pioneer in food retail chains was undoubtedly Feargal Quinn, the founder of the Superquinn stores, one of the largest food chains stored in Ireland. To obtain feedback from his customers, he spent afternoons at the checkout and evenings at focus groups with his customers, in order to keep ahead of his competitors and make sure his offering was aligned to his customers needs. Through this process he was able to introduce a whole series of rewards and benefits for his customers that have been copied by other retail food stores such as Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's.  Offering items near their sell by date at a discounted price, having attendants to pack customers bags, offering crèche facilities are examples to name but a few.

Terry Leahy, the Chief Executive of Tesco also places considerable importance in involving customers in the business. Known originally as a supermarket that focused on discounted price and volume, Tesco has really listened to its customers needs and found many ways to improve its service levels. Resulting in a substantial growth in its turnover and profits and in 1996 Tesco overtook Sainsburys as the UK biggest food retailer and has stayed ahead ever since. To quote Terry Leahy, "When we stopped chasing Sainsburys and chased our customers instead, we started beating Sainsbury's".

My advice would be to follow the excellent model implemented by the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Group described by described by Theo Gilbert-Jamison as  the Six Principles of Service Excellence. This proven strategy although pioneered in the hospitality sector can be used in every profit-oriented and non-profit oriented organisation of any size or sector.

To give you a brief overview the concept focuses on six principles that need to be embedded into the culture of the organisation to achieve success in terms of revenue profitability, sustained employee engagement and loyalty, consistent quality product and services, sustained leadership engagement and customer loyalty.

The 1^st principle is that the philosophical framework of the company i.e. the vision/mission/values should be couched in terms that employees can understand, relate to and aspire to. Any customer service charter must reflect the same values and principles and clearly outline what customers can expect in terms of interactions with the organisation.

The 2^nd principle is that the business objectives should include service excellence  that include increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty,  employee engagement, reducing  employee turnover, and reducing customer complaints and internal service failures. Thus ensuring that  each  employee in every department understands the importance and  relationship  between the financial goals of revenue and profit and service excellence.

The 3^rd principle is that the service standards should reflect the philosophical framework of the organisation. Many organisations struggle to align their workforces with the mission and  values this is because they lack service standards that define the type of  behaviour expected from everyone.

The 4^th principle is to develop a service excellence strategy that will embed the vision, mission, values, and service standards into every aspect of the organisation's culture. Employee training and development is the obvious first intervention. However a full gap analysis is necessary in order to identify any barriers within the organisation that prevent the delivery of service excellence. Typical barriers may include no alignment of values as there is no vision, mission or values, a poor and inconsistent selection process for employees, lack of service standards resulting in inconsistency of service delivery and no employee accountability.

The 5^th principle is organisational alignment. Effectively the process used "'to rally the  troops"  to achieve the vision/mission and business objectives,  in order to maintain  sustainability. The  internal communications programme  is the vehicle and the medium can vary.  Internet/Intranet communications, internal newsletters or magazines,  the employee handbook, or more  personal interactions such as daily line-ups, weekly team meetings with management, monthly management meetings, quarterly employee forums,  and of course the normal array of visual aids such as posters, desk promotional items and pins.

The 6^th and final principle is the need for measurement and Leadership Accountability. Measurement is essential for service excellence as for any other initiative. Not only to establish credibility but also for senior management to be able to determine the return on investment or quantify the perceived value of the initiative. If this is accompanied by a balanced score card for service excellence then this becomes a very powerful tool to communicate either the success or failure of the initiative. Ultimately the goal of measurement is to ensure consistency, leadership accountability and provide the input for team reward and recognition.