Category Archives: Service Excellence

Business strategy, Customer Service, Employability, Employability Skills, Leadership, Leadership Development, OTM Service Strategy, Service Excellence, Strategy

Is your People Strategy aligned with your Service Strategy?

Your organisation’s People Strategy includes everything from recruitment, to development and the way people exit your organisation. People are fundamental to the implementation of your Service Strategy so the way that you approach your recruitment, development and exit processes are examples of that strategy in action. 
How do you recruit, develop and exit people from your organisation? 
Are these activities performed in a way that reflects a service approach toward your people?
Copyright Gary Ryan 2011
Research Participant
The way people are exited from an organisation is a true test of its approach to service. When the company had to reduce staff numbers through no direct fault of its own and it did everything it could over a 12 month peeriod to help to prepare the exiting staff for their next job, I thought to myself, “This company really cares about people. I hope that their next company cares as much.”
Why not use this article as a catalyst for Conversations That Matter® within your workplace.
 
The OTM Service Strategy includes 7 key elements and 50 attributes that provide synergy for an effective service strategy. Find out more here.


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

Does clutter detract from the services you offer?

Clutter creates stress and creates a sense of disorganisation. What systems do you have in place to keep both front-of-house and back-of-house areas free from clutter?

If you ‘sweep your mess under a carpet’ rather than clean it properly, your back-of-house systems and processes will eventually let your front-of-house operations down.

Would you be comfortable letting the public see your back of house operation? If not, why not?

What could you do about this situation?

Copyright Gary Ryan 2011

 Research Participant
Our back of house operations had always been a shambles. But we seemed to keep getting away with it. Until one day we didn’t. And the company nearly went broke because of it. Luckily we survived and we cleaned our act up. Literally!


Why not use this article as a catalyst for Conversations That Matter® within your organisation.

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

OHS&E, Privacy and Risk are all about Service Excellence

A service approach to occupational, health, safety, environmental, privacy and risk management issues means that your underlying approach is not one of compliance, but one of creating an environment that is safe and productive for your staff, and one that is safe and respectful for your customers.

A service approach means that you proactively schedule reviews of these aspects of your work so that you are never out-of-date. This means that you may go over and above standards set out by the law. Sometimes they just aren’t what the standard should be.

What is your organisation’s approach to these aspects of service excellence?
©Copyright Gary Ryan 2011
Research Participant
I used to get quite stressed about safety compliance issues. Once I shifted my thinking and recognised that safety isn’t about compliance but about being able to deliver great service, it somehow made it easier.
Why not use this article as a catalyst for Conversations That Matter® within your workplace.
Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Market Communication Gap, OTM Service Strategy, Service Excellence

What promises are on your corporate website?

Recently when working with people in the areas of management development and/or service excellence, I have been surprised by how many employees know very little about what is on their company website.
Upon discovering this issue I then ask the staff members if they have ever had situations where clients have referred to something that they had read or viewed on their website that the staff member didn’t know about.
Nearly everyone has said that they had experienced such a situation.

When I then ask who they believe is responsible for ensuring that they (the employees) know what is on the website, they reply, “Senior Management” or “The Marketing Department”.

Very few people say, “Me!”.

In reality it is a two way street. Senior managers and marketers should communicate with staff regarding what is being communicated via the corporate website. Staff should also take personal responsibility for knowing what is being communicated. In this way the Market – Communication Gap can be minimised or eliminated.

What is your experience of this issue?

Find out about the OTM Service Strategy to help you to close your market – Communication Gap.

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

RACV misses second chance, will there be a third?

In a recent post If you treat me like a number I’ll behave like a human I shared a story regarding the RACV being ‘happy’ for me, a long term customer, to ‘try out’ their competitors for $70. For many years I have spent thousands each year being insured through the RACV, for both personal and business purposes.

Having discovered the their competition’s ‘normal’ price was 25% better than the RACV’s ‘discounted price’ on vehicle insurance, and the RACV’s reluctance to see me as a human being with whom it has a long term relationship, I sought the assistance of an insurance broker to help me find a business insurance policy to replace one that was due to expire with the RACV. The one I have now purchased was just under 10% cheaper than the RACV policy.

My assumption is that RACV uses a sophisticated Customer Relationship Management System (CRMS). Such a system would have a significant amount of information about me including my entire history of insurances with the RACV.

As a result of recent events this system should include two critical pieces of information

1. I received a quote for a new vehicle insurance through my business that was not activated
2. One of my business insurance policies expired and was not renewed

I have been waiting (and wondering) if the RACV would contact me to discuss our business relationship. My assumption was that these two pieces of information would cause some sort of a ‘warning’ within their CRMS that something had gone wrong with our relationship.

Yesterday I received a courtesy call regarding the business insurance renewal. I explained that I had gone with another provider. To my surprise the RACV representative could not end the call quickly enough. There was no request to know why I had chosen to leave, just a polite “Thank you, good-bye”. Should I have been asked I would have been happy to politely share my story, to off the RACV the gift of my feedback.

I couldn’t help but think that the RACV is losing a long term customer and it either doesn’t know, can’t see the signs or simply doesn’t care.

As each of my insurances fall due I will continue to see what the market has to offer. Already I have saved multiple hundreds of dollars through moving two policies.

Prior to my recent experience the last time I had investigated what the ‘opposition’ had to offer (as far as my insurances are concerned) was in 1993. Since then I had been paying my renewal notices under the illusion that I was a valued customer of the RACV. I was the classic ‘loyal customer’.

The $70 improved rate that the RACV refused to provide me on the new car insurance has already cost it two policies worth several thousand dollars. Does that make any business sense at all? If the RACV had provided that $70 differential, which is clearly within its profit range because it does provide that extra 5% discount to people, then I would have continued to be a loyal customer and not researched what the opposition was offering. When I discovered the huge differential I could not help but wonder whether I had been lulled into a sense of getting a good deal through my loyalty, when in fact my discounts were being applied to uncompetitive rates. In a strange way the RACV has done me a favour through its poor service as I am now saving money by going to their competitors.

How is the RACV using its CRMS to help maintain strong relationships with its clients?
In the long term can they afford to treat loyal customers in similar ways that I have experienced?

I wonder if I will be contacted at any time to discuss our relationship?
Will the RACV do anything to try to recover this situation?

If you have a CRMS how do you use it? Does it help you to maintain healthy relationships with your customers? What would you do in this situation if you were the RACV?

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

Team members always reflect your brand in great service companies

The way team members behave, how they are attired and the way they speak should reflect a consistent brand message. Please don’t be mistaken. This does not mean that staff become robotic in their behaviour and appearance (unless that is a deliberate aspect of the brand strategy for the organisation).
Southwest Airlines are a terrific example of brand management. Their people, irrespective of role truly reflect the spirit of freedom in the way they perform their jobs. Southwest staff have fun on the job and the enjoyment positively infects their customers. In addition the way that the staff are treated by the organisation demonstrates that staff come first.
At Southwest pilots are renowned for helping ground crew load and unload baggage from their planes. Why? Fast turnaround times are key to Southwest’s service and profitability, and the pilots no it and support the practice of doing what needs to be done (safely and in a fun way when appropriate) to achieve great service.
The customer is not always right. Employees, not customers, come first… “The customer is sometimes wrong. We don’t carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, ‘Fly somebody else. Don’t abuse our people’” (Herb Kelleher, CEO Southwest Airlines, quoted in (Freiberg et al., 1996 p.268)

Why not use this article to catalyse Conversations That Matter® in your organisation. 

Contact Gary Ryan to discover how the OTM Service Strategy® can enhance your capacity to deliver service excellence. 

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Conversation Starters, Conversations That Matter, Customer Service, Employability, Leaders, Leadership, Service Excellence

Service excellence requires measuring and responding

A fundamental aspect of service excellence is the tools that an organisation uses to measure how it is performing.

In this context the Service Standards that form the basic building blocks of the organisations systems and processes have to be able to be measured. At their highest level organisations should be able to recognise how they are performing at each of the six key drivers of service excellence and each local team should be able to do likewise.

The capacity to appropriately respond to what the measurements are telling an organisation is also critical for service excellence. This means that your measurement systems must be time bound so that the information is current and therefore useful. Some measurements will be lag indicators of activities that have been completed in the past, while other measurements will provide lead indicators identifying where a particular aspect of your service strategy is headed into the future.

A lag indicator may be your sales results for the past month. A lead indicator may be the number of customer ‘contacts’ you have ‘alive’ in your marketing funnel which will act as an indicator for how many sales you may make the following month.

How do you measure your service standards? What lead and lag indicators are you using?

Copyright Gary Ryan 2011

Research Participant
It wasn’t until we started to look at our service strategy and ask ourselves whether or not we were measuring what was really important to us that we started to improve. We had promised people that we would get back to them within 24 hours but we didn’t have a clue whether or not we were achieving that standard. To our horror we discovered that our response time was more like 36 hours than 24 hours. It took us about three months but we eventually got our average down to 10 hours, well ahead of the base standard that we had set.

Please feel free to use this article to stimulate Conversations That Matter® within your organisation.

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

Recognise, Reward and Celebrate Great Service

All organisations need to be able to recognise how they are performing with regard to their Service Strategy.

They also need to have the capacity to recognise and reward their staff for their great service.

Celebrating milestones and achievements is a critical aspect of a service culture and sends positive messages to staff about the value that great service holds within the company.

Establishing programs that recognise and reward staff for great service are essential tools for re-enforcing what really matters in your organisation.

I have been fortunate enough to both lead and be part of teams who have been nationally recognised for their achievements in providing great service. To watch those team members shout with joy when their organisation’s name was called out has been a delight. Think about it – these people were shouting for joy as if they were at a football match and their team had just scored a goal. Well their work team had just scored a goal – a goal in providing great service!

The energy that the recognition created was tangible – you literally could ‘feel it’ and the benefit for staff engagement and continuing on the continuous improvement journey was well worth the effort to enter the awards competitions.

How do you recognise, reward and celebrate great service?

Whether you are big or small, you cannot give good customer service if your employees don’t feel good about coming to work. (Martin Oliver)

Please feel free to use this article as a catalyst for Conversations That Matter® inside your organisation.

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

If you treat me like a number I’ll behave like a human!

Why would any company let a member and long term customer worth $1,000s of dollars to them every year try out the opposition for $70?

Yet that is exactly what the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV) did with me recently. I have a full range of personal and company insurances held with the RACV. Upon contacting them to set up a new policy for a company asset I was informed that only my company business mattered in terms of this new policy.

Technically the RACV consultant was correct even though she informed me that she could see all of my information, both personal and business on her screen. When it was clear that ‘nothing can be done’ I reluctantly searched for contact numbers from the RACV’s competitors.

When I then contacted a competitor I discovered that not only could they beat the price that I had been quoted by the RACV but they were able to beat it by over 25%!

The reason that I was even talking to a competitor was because the RACV was not able see me as a human being. Rather I was two membership numbers. One for me as a private person and the other for me as a company. Despite their admittance that they understood the individual ‘me’ and the ‘company me’ are one in the same they refused to provide me with the same level of ‘discount’ that I normally receive as an individual.

The actual dollar figure I am talking about in this example is $70. If the ‘normal’ discount that I receive was applied to this new policy, my new policy would have been $70 cheaper than I was quoted. I know that it isn’t much, but it is the principle of the matter that counts. In one experience I very quickly went from being a human with a long term relationship dating back to 1986 to two sets of numbers. When I explained that it seemed crazy to me that the RACV was happy for me to speak with their competitors for a matter of $70 which could potentially lead to the defection of policies worth $1,000s of dollars over the next 12 months, the consultant, while sympathetic told me that there was nothing she could do.

Upon going to their competition, in this case AAMI I was provided with a quote that was more than 25% better than the price quoted by the RACV. 25%! Can you believe the difference? I couldn’t. So I accepted it.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com