Category Archives: Customer Service

Conversations That Matter, Customer Service, Leaders, Leadership, Leadership Development, OTM Service Strategy, Service Excellence

Why the development & recruitment of people lies at the heart of your service strategy

Existing staff need to be developed so that they have the capacity to implement your Service Strategy. This will result in them having the capacity to understand the expectations of their customers and being able to develop appropriate service standards from that understanding.

New staff need to be recruited through processes that identify their alignment with your Service Strategy. This means that the organisation’s recruitment processes must reflect a process that is seeking the best possible people that it can find so that its Service Strategy can be implemented.

The result is a virtuous cycle that re-enforces great service. When people love their work they attract other high quality to want to work with them too. The reverse is also true. The wrong people in the wrong jobs who end up hating what they do don’t provide great service. How could they!

How do your development and recuitment practices support the establishment of a virtuous cycle for great service in your organisation?

Why not use this article to stimulate Conversations That Matter® with your team.


©Copyright Gary Ryan 2011

Research Participant
Our recruitment policy used to be, “Do you know anyone who has a heartbeat and is available?”. Me, I’d been here 20 years and had never been on any training. I never realised how bad we were until I honestly thought about whether I’d like to be a customer of my own team. My answer was no!

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Employability, Leaders, Leadership, OTM Service Strategy, Professional Development, Service Excellence

How strategy and S&Ps support great service

All staff, whether the CEO or the lowest paid employee in the organisation have a high sense of job satisfaction when they are able to serve their customers properly. When systems & processes exist to support the passion of people, great service can flow through an organisation.

The staff satisfaction that comes from providing great service is an outcome of the support that an organisation’s strategy and systems & processes provide for the staff members when they are in the act of providing their service. In turn, this type of internal relationship results in a virtuous cycle that generates great service at the customer interface, whether internal or external to the organisation.

In this sense, it is absolutely vital that systems & processes support staff in building positive relationships with clients, customers and stakeholders. Without this support delivering great service and staff job satisfaction fall through the floor.

How well do your organisation’s systems & processes support staff to deliver great service?

Copyright Gary Ryan 2011

Relationship employees work harder and smarter. They care about the business, its future, its destiny. The business becomes their business. 
Leonard L Berry – researcher and author
Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Employability, Employability Skills, Leaders, Leadership, Leadership Development, OTM Service Strategy, Service Excellence

Service Standards exist so that we can create Great Service

Service standards are the in-house systems and processes, policies and procedures that your organisation has created to give it every possible chance of meeting and exceeding the expectations of its customers.

They create the possibility of consistency while allowing the people in your organisation to make decisions that lead to improved service outcomes. It is not always necessary to create new service standards; many of them already exist in operating manuals, rules, procedures and policies.

The challenge is to determine whether they support or hinder great service. The ‘bureaucracy busting’ of the GE Workout program (The Boundaryless Organisation by Ashkenas, Ulrich, Jick, & Kerr, 1995) is an example of a process that at its very heart was about ensuring the company’s systems and processes remained aligned to serving people and achieving the organisation’s goals.

Copyright Gary Ryan 2011

Research Participant
We think that it is great when a new person starts work here. We encourage them to ask questions. So they do. “Why does this policy and that policy exist?” That’s what they ask. And if we haven’t got a genuine answer, then we seriously look at the policy or procedure and change it if it is no longer helping us to serve our customers.
Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Employability, Organisations That Matter, OTM Service Strategy, United Airlines, United Breaks Guitars

United Breaks Guitars – A classic ‘service gone wrong’ story

When a fellow passenger called out, “My God they’re throwing guitars out there!” Canadian singer/songwriter Dave Carroll was horrified when he realised the guitars were his.

With his guitar broken and horribly damaged Dave spent 12 months chasing United Airlines to pay for the damage they had caused. With nothing less than indifference, United Airlines did not offer a sincere apology nor did they fix his guitar and repay Dave for the cost of repairing his equipment.

So Dave and his band, Sons of Maxwell, did what they do best. They wrote a song (and then a second one) about their experience and released it on YouTube.

The song was an immediate YouTube ‘hit’ and you can see that there have been currently over 10.5 million ‘hits’ on the song.

Within a day of the release of the song United’s share price had dropped by 10%. The value of the drop in shareprice could have bought Dave 51,000 guitars.

The moral of this story is that we live in exponential times. Not every story will go ‘viral’ – but you just don’t know which ones will. If a company gets something wrong, which does happen from time to time, then the best thing to do is to fix it as fair and fast a way as possible.

The OTM Service Strategy® is a system that has been designed to enhance an organisations capacity to provide a consistent and continuously improving system for service excellence. Contact me if you would like to arrange a conversation regarding how the OTM Service Strategy® could benefit your organisation.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Employability, Leadership, OTM Service Strategy, Service Excellence

Understanding Expectations at a Deeper Level

Gary Ryan explains five dimensions that need to be understood if you wish to meet and exceed customer expectations.

Research by Parasuraman, Berry and Zeithaml (1991) and re-enforced by many others established that customer expectations are generally fairly basic. They expect organisations to do what they are supposed to do. The more they pay the higher the level of service they expect, but they don’t expect poor service just because they may pay a low price. There is a basic level of service that is expected irrespective of price. An interesting finding is that customers expect organisations to ‘play fair’.
There are five dimensions to customer expectations. These include reliability, tangibles, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. Reliability is the outcome of the service. Tangibles usually relate to the appearance of the physical features of the service while the service is being experienced. Responsiveness is the willingness to assist and to provide prompt service when the service is being experienced. Assurance is the knowledge of employees and their level of courtesy while the service is being experienced. Empathy is the ‘care factor’ shown by employees. Do they genuinely care about their customers?
The reliability dimension is critical with regard to meeting customer expectations. The other four dimensions are critical in exceeding customer expectations.
Finally, customer expectations include a range from a desired level down to an adequate level. The range can vary from customer to customer and from service/product to service/product.
Let’s look at a common internal service, salary processing. Let’s assume that the system is set up for people to be paid on a Tuesday night. When people wake up on a Wednesday morning they expect their pay to be in their bank account. Assuming their has been a hiccup in the system, receiving their pay sometime on Wednesday morning may represent the adequate level of the service for most people. Wednesday afternoon may be too late for the majority of people and their focus may have shifted from performing their jobs to worrying about when they will be paid. Not a good scenario! The range of tolerance for the customer expectations associated with this service will have been exceeded.
The point here is that most services and products have a range of tolerance. This issue is, do you know the range for your products/services. If you go beyond this range of tolerance then you will have little if no chance of meeting the expectations of your customers.
Copyright Gary Ryan 2011
Quote from a research participant
Knowing the expectations of the people you serve is paramount if you want to be successful.
Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Employability, Leadership, OTM Academy, OTM Service Strategy, Service Excellence

Great Service Attracts Customers

While it isn’t rocket science, many people and organisations forget that consistently providing great service attracts customers to your organisation. Referencing long time researcher and author Leonard L Berry, Gary Ryan explains this fundamental concept.

Leonard Berry (1995) has long advocated that great service attracts customers. This is because there are so many companies who are poor at service delivery.

It is therefore easy for customers to differentiate between good and poor service companies and providing the benefit that the customer receives is more than their burden for obtaining that service or product, customers will continue to be attracted to great service.

Berry also highlights that a large benefit of great service is that positive word-of-mouth advertising is generated by great service. The internet has made that easier than ever. People use Facebook every day to ‘Like’ positive updates about products and services from their friends. The same is also true for poor service.

Great service attracts customers. Poor service pushes them away.

Which category is your organisation in?

Copyright Gary Ryan 2011

Quote from a research participant
For a long period of time my friend had been telling me about this bakery near where she lives. Finally I went there. She was right! The people and the ‘taste bud delights’ were fantastic! You should go there too.

Join Gary at the OTM Academy to discover more about the OTM Service Strategy and creating an organisation that matters!

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Employability, Leaders, Leadership, OTM Service Strategy, Service Excellence

Who is The Customer?

Many people don’t like the term ‘customer service’ for good reason. However, this doesn’t mean that the principles of ‘service excellence’ don’t apply to how they go about doing their work. Gary Ryan explains how ‘service excellence’ enables you to exceed expectations no matter what you call your ‘customers’.

Many people get hung up on the word ‘customer’. This is the challenge with the concept of ‘customer service’ because many people think that they don’t have ‘customers’. And maybe they don’t. Maybe they have clients, colleagues, administrators, staff, stakeholders, lawyers, doctors, labourors, community members, students, guests and any other label that you can think about. The issue is not the label; the issue is the ethic behind how you treat people.
Another way of looking at it is to say that ‘the customer’ is anyone who receives the output of your work. Anyone.
This is why we prefer the term, “service excellence” over “customer service”. Unfortunately many people think that they don’t have ‘customers’ (because they use a different term) so they conclude that service has nothing to do with them. But it has everything to do with them. Everyone is your customer. Everyone.

Copyright Gary Ryan 2011

Research Participant
You know that I can’t stand the word ‘customer’. The people I serve are staff, not customers. I find out what they want and I do my best to exceed their expectations every time. So I wish people would stop saying that I have to be ‘customer’ oriented. I’m staff oriented and that is what is important!

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Employability, OTM Service Strategy, Service Excellence

Gap 5 – The Perceived Service-Quality Gap

The final gap is the perceived service that the customer has of their experience in relation to their original expectation of the product or service. Ideally there is no gap here or, if there is a gap, it is in the context that the perceived service level is higher than original expectations.
What gap, if any are your customers experiencing?
Copyright Gary Ryan 2011

Quote from a research participant
You know they don’t really have to do all that much. If they just met my expectations I’d be happy. But they really don’t seem to care. And as soon as I get a chance to go somewhere else I will. And they won’t even know what happened to me. It’s a shame, really. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Conversation, Customer Service, Leaders, Leadership, OTM Service Strategy, Service Excellence, Service Gaps

Gap 4 – The Market – Communication Gap

If you say that you will respond to online customer feedback within 24 hours and you consistently take 48 hours to do it, then you have created a Market – Communication Gap.

The local barber who cuts my hair has two signs out the front of his barber’s shop. One sign says that the shop will be open at 8:30am. The second says 8:45am. The barber is rarely there before 9am. He has no idea how many people have looked in his window when he wasn’t open when he advertised that he would be.

My expectations are consistently not being met. One day a new barber/hairdresser will move into an empty shop in the shopping strip. What do you think I will do?

What Market – Communication Gaps are you creating?

Why not use this article to catalyse Conversations That Matter® within your team or organisation.

Copyright Gary Ryan 2011

Quote from the barber

Sorry mate. I know that I said sorry the last couple of times but my car broke down and I had to wait for my wife. Sorry mate.
Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Employability, Employability Skills, OTM Service Strategy, Service Excellence

Human error drives the service – delivery gap

Gap 3 – The Service – Delivery Gap
Even after all the systems and processes have been created, both the automated and human elements of the system must do what they are supposed to do. System errors or breakdowns and humans not doing what they are supposed to do can create immediate service gaps. No system or human is perfect or infallible. As such your organisation must continually focus on minimising system and human errors. In addition, know what you will do if a Service Delivery Gap does occur. 
A local small business operator has a sign on his door that he will open at 8am. His staff are never there by 8am despite being employed to be there at that time. Consistently being late on a personal level creates a service delivery gap for an organisation.
What are your service-delivery gaps?
Copyright Gary Ryan 2011
Quote from a research participant
Ultimately your staff have to do the right thing. It’s important to have the best systems and processes that you can, but ultimately your staff have to do the right thing. They have to properly implement what they are supposed to do.
Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com