Category Archives: Service Excellence

Customer Service, Leaders, Leadership, OTM Service Strategy, Service Excellence

Great service starts with identifying expectations

This is the starting point for great service. If you don’t understand the expectations of your customers, then everything that you do is likely to contribute to failing to meet them. Customers will have expectations whether you understand them or not. They usually consist of outcome factors and process factors and have a zone of tolerance for them to be acceptable.
The outcome factors relate to the reliability of the service/product and determine whether the service/product meets the customers’ expectations. The process factors relate to the customers experience and will determine if the customers’ expectations have been exceeded or not.

Quote from a research participant
Once you realise that the starting point is understanding expectations, everything else becomes a whole lot easier. All you have to do is ask people what they want, and then do your best to deliver that to them.

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

News Flash – Great service attracts customers!

Leonard Berry (author of On Great Service, 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. In short, great service attracts customers.

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!

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

Great service identifies what we shouldn’t be doing

Just as great service tells us what we should be focussing upon and where our resources should be allocated, great service also helps to identify what we need to stop doing or what we should not start doing in the first place.

Southwest Airlines is an example of an organisation that is clear about the service that its customers want. They want safe, regular, reliable services that will get them to their destination on time delivered by genuine, caring and courteous staff.

Everything else, the in-flight food, the styling of the tickets etc. is all secondary to the main expectations of its customers.

Southwest’s Customer Charter outlines how it respects and addresses the expectations of its customers. You will not find Southwest Airlines placing a lot of focus on in-flight food. While it is available, it is not the main focus of their service. So they don’t put any more effort than is required into that part of their service.

Southwest’s service focus enables it to know what to do and what not to do.

Quote
After we had expelled three members from the centre and fully refunded their memberships (even though they had already used 90% of their time) we were approached by more than 30 members who told us that if we had not acted and expelled the three people, then they would have all gone and joined another centre. It really re-enforced that our members’ code of behaviour was there for a reason. The worst thing we could have done was to have turned a blind eye to it. It would have cost us.

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

Income grows when you deliver great service

We have already identified that great service requires everyone and everything in the organisation to be aligned to enable the business to meet/exceed customer expectations. Think about your own experience as a customer. When your expectations are met and/or exceeded are you likely to use that service and/or to recommend it to others? Most often the answer to this questions is, “Yes!”.

Therefore it is not rocket science to see the relationship between providing a consistently good service/product and income growth. Don’t forget that a basic principle of great service is knowing and meeting/exceeding customer expectations. As expectations change, so does the service or product. Great service is not great service if it is not current. Gronroos (2000) highlights that it costs 5-6 times as much to attract a new customer as it does to keep an existing customer. So not only does great service increase income, it keeps costs down.

Why not use this article to stimulate Conversations That Matter® within your team or organisation?

Quote from a research participant
I’m a financial clerk. My job involves a lot of report writing. One day I asked one of the recipients of my reports if there was anything else that I could do for him. He said yes and explained this new report he wanted. It didn’t take long for me to create it and I now include it in my monthly reports. Last week he told me that he had recently made some decisions based on the patterns emerging from the new reports and that sales had gone up. I couldn’t believe it, I’m a financial clerk and I had actually contributed to making more money for the company.


What are your example of how great service has grown income?

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

Delivering great service gives us job satisfaction

All staff, whether the CEO or the lowliest 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 satisfaction that comes from serving people results from the positive relationship that staff feel with an organisation when they are supported in serving their customers. Positive staff relationships result in improved service. In turn, this type of relationship results in a positively reinforcing virtuous cycle that generates great service. 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 systems & processes support staff to deliver great service in your organisation?

Quote
Relationship employees work harder and smarter. They care about the business, its future, its destiny. The business becomes their business. (Leonard L Berry)

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

Awareness matters!

The scene
I had been asked to attend a late afternoon meeting with a client in a different part of the city to which my office is located. I decided to drive to the meeting so that I could drive home. As luck would have it, a one hour metered carpark was available immediately outside the client’s building.

Upon arrival the receptionist asked where I had parked. I informed her that I had parked in the one hour zone out the front of the building.

I was shown to the meeting room and some cool, fresh water was provided. I was informed that the person I was meeting had been held up in another meeting off-site and was on his way, possibly being 30 minutes late.

The moment that mattered
Prior to the arrival of my client, the receptionist popped her head back into the meeting room and asked whether it would be okay for her to pop downstairs to ‘feed the meter’ for me.

I had started to wonder how I was going to manage the parking situation given that a large period of my 60 minutes had been ‘chewed up’ waiting for my client to arrive. The awareness of the receptionist, Crystal, to help me was just terrific. Crystal realised that I might be starting to worry about my car and that the parking issue could end up being a problem for me should the meeting last longer than the now available 30 minutes.

To me Crystal’s actions highlight the importance of awareness and how it is directly linked to service excellence. Crystal could not control whether my client’s availability, but she was able to control her awareness to relieve a problem before it occurred.

That is exactly what awareness does. It ‘heads problems off at the pass’, before they have a chance to take effect.

What are your examples of how awareness has both enhanced service excellence and resolved a problem before it occurred?

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

How great service attracts requests for a broader range of products/services

In much the same way that great service attracts new customers, it also attracts existing customers to enquire about new services/products that may be provided by the organisation. Consulting firms in particular are familiar with this phenomenon. Satisfied clients will request if new services can be provided before seeking another consulting firm to supply the service. This can help an organisation grow.

A word of warning.

Just because a customer asks your organisation to provide a new service or product doesn’t mean you should do it. As long as the new service or product fits with your organisational purpose and will continue to take the organisation towards its desired future and the organisation has the capacity to provide the new service, then it should do it. Otherwise it should refer the customer elsewhere. This too is great service.

How is delivering great service increase resulting in requests for ‘more’ from your clients/customers?

Client quote
Because of the great job that you did with our leadership training I was wondering if you could assist with improving our inter-departmental relationships? I thought that I’d check with you first before trying out some of our other suppliers.

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

Service enables us to identify our customers

Your customers can be colleagues, your supervisor, the staff who report to you, the people and/or organisations to whom you provide services, the people who pay for your services or products even though others may use them. Often your service or product will have multiple layers of customers. The customers who actually use your service or product may be different from the customers who purchase your service or product. A service focus helps both you and your organisation to identify and differentiate the expectations of these different customer segments. If you don’t get this right, you may be left with no customers at all.

Understand your customers across the multiple levels of service you provide. Do you understand yours?

Quote from a research participant
“I first thought that this service training stuff was a load of, well, you know! But it got me thinking. Who are my customers? Funnily the first person who’s head popped in my mind was my boss’s. I’d never really thought of my boss as a customer. Yet, she probably is.”

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
alignment, Leaders, Leadership, Message, Service Excellence

Is your message and the experience you create aligned?

This really isn’t rocket science but I am continually amazed at how many organisations get this wrong. Recently my family have been doing high school tours to help us make a decision regarding the right school for our eldest child.

The schools have had many different approaches to this process. However, their messages have been very similar, “We create a caring, belonging and nurturing environment for your child where we seek to create well rounded young adults with strong academic and life skills.”

Yet it is our experience of this message that has stood out the most for us. One school that had over 900 students crammed us into a room where three teachers and three students spent 60 minutes ‘telling’ us about the nurturing and sense of belonging that the school creates. The speeches were fine, the images shown to us on the Powerpoint presentation also looked fine.

The teachers then stayed in that room while the three students led over crowded tours around the school. Classrooms were closed, it had become dark and lights were off and we spent most of the time peering in through windows trying to get a sense of what the school was like.

After a while the litter on the ground became more and more noticeable. After all, there wasn’t much else to see or experience.

It seems to me that if you are going to promote a sense of belonging, then that is the ‘experience’ that you should do your very best to create. This is a classic case of ensuring that your message and the experience you create are aligned. All it takes is a few moments to ask this question, “Is the experience we are going to create aligned with our message?”

The school I have described is no longer on our list. Other parents who have also visited the school for their tours have expressed similar concerns. The school is completely unaware of the misalignment between their message and the experience they are creating.

How do you make sure that your message and the experience you create are aligned?

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

Service helps us make sense or our strategy at the day to day level

Business strategy focuses upon enabling an organisation to move from its present state to a desired future state. It provides the ‘roadmap’ for this movement. Ultimately this results in thousands upon thousands of actions happening throughout the organisation. The intention of these actions is to move the organisation in the desired direction that the strategy dictates.

Each action is therefore an example of the organisation’s ‘strategy in action’. A clear service focus enables these actions to ‘make sense’ in the context of the overall business strategy and can help to connect the people within the organisation to the business strategy on a day to day, action by action level.

Quote from a research participant
When I understood that all I had to do was to focus on understanding the expectations of the people I serve, the whole service thing became a lot clearer. I’m not into big words and I’m not a manager, but I can find out what people expect of me and do my best to fulfil those expectations.

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