Category Archives: Service Excellence

Customer Service, Gen Y, Generation Y, Leaders, Professionals, Service Excellence, Young Professionals

Great service connects customers to your busines

Service quality pioneers Zeithaml, Berry and Parasuraman (1985) identified that service quality, reduced service problems and the capacity to promptly and appropriately resolve problems when they arise are significant factors that enhance customer retention, loyalty and referrals.

The challenge here is to do these three core service activities in a cost effective manner that either meets or exceeds the real expectations of the customer. As you will read in another article this does not mean providing a ‘5 Star’ level of service when the customer is expecting a ‘2 Star’ level. It means what it says – providing the level of service expected by the customer at a fair exchange for that service.

Think about it. You are already a potential expert on good service.

“What, I’m an expert?” you might say.

A potential expert.

You spend an enormous amount of your time as a customer, whether in a retail or hospitality context, or as a customer of other colleagues while at work. You know when you receive good service, just as you know when you receive bad service. You know what good service ‘feels like’. Therefore, you also know what poor service feels like. It then follows that good service that helps people to feel good helps them to stay connected to the organisation.

Please feel free to comment on this article.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
High Performance, Integrity, Professionals, Service Excellence, What Really Matters For Young Professionals, Young Professionals

What are the fundamentals in your business that you just cannot afford to get wrong?

I have spent the last couple of days in hospital having had my appendix removed. My experience of the hospital was fantastic with a high level of care shown by all the staff with whom I came into contact.

Last evening I witnessed an event that displayed integrity and courage, while also highlighting that serious mistakes can be made even in a well run hospital.

At about 8:30pm a senior nurse came in to speak with an elderly gentleman with whom I was sharing my ward. She informed him that he had been given someone else’s medicine an hour earlier. She told him that she had checked with his doctor and that there weren’t any issues regarding side effects with the incorrect medicines that he had taken. She also apologised profusely for the error.

From my perspective the nurse showed courage and integrity by admitting the mistake, initiative by checking with the patient’s doctor before informing him of the mistake and she also provided a genuine apology.

This experience got me thinking. In a hospital it would seem that giving the wrong medicine to the wrong patient is a fundamental error that shouldn’t occur. It would appear that human error was involved. Six Sigma was a system that was introduced at Motorola as a way of creating a culture that minimises such fundamental mistakes. Six Sigma officially translates to 3.4 mistakes every 1 million efforts. I’d like to think that, at the hospital where I have just spent the last few days, the mistake that I experienced was one of the 3.4 in one million!

So, the question for you is, “What are the fundamental errors that you should be minimising? What systems do you have in place to ensure that human error is minimised?” Even a short stay in hospital can provide opportunities for reflection and improvement. I’m certainly reviewing our systems and processes in the context of this experience.

Please feel free to comment on this article.

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

Service excellence comes in many forms

Service is not just a traditional retail experience. Examples of service include the willingness to allow direct reports to make mistakes so that they can learn (even though you could have done the task faster and to a higher quality yourself). Cleaning up after yourself in the lunch room. Picking up rubbish in the foyer and placing it in the bin. Letting others go first through a doorway. Offering your seat to someone not as healthy as yourself when riding public transport. Listening to a colleague when they just need another human’s ear. These are all simple examples of service. Service can be everywhere and it can be nowhere. How present is service in your life?

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

Why good service is good business

In highly competitive times it makes sense that good service is good business. Even though customers are not particularly loyal, providing great service consistently and over a long period of time makes it all the more difficult for your competitors to attract your customers away from you. While your customers will try out the competition, if they do not receive a higher and consistent standard of service than your organisation provides, then your customers will come back and be less inclined to try out the competition again.

Implicitly your customers will trust you (just as you, in turn, trust your staff). It is however, good practice to maintain a healthy tension about your customers trying out the competition. The day that you either think that you don’t have any competition, or the day that you stop providing good service on a consistent basis, is the day that your organisation will start to decline.

No job is secure. But good, consistent service increases the security of every job, every department and every organisation. Good service IS good business!

Quote from a participant in one of our research activities

“Great service actually feels good. It feels good for me, it feels good for the people I’m serving and it keeps the business humming along. To me, good service just makes sense.”

Please feel free to ask a question or to make a comment about this article.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
McDonald's, Service Excellence, What Matters, What Really Matters

Why local store cultures matter!

It is only fair that I declare that from 1983 to 1986 I worked part time at McDonald’s on Dandenong Road in Clayton North, Melbourne Australia. That store was the first metropolitan store for McDonald’s in Australia, so we always had a sense of pride in our work. As a young teenager I learnt a lot about teamwork, service excellence, the importance of speed and attention to detail, as well as the importance of staff appearance, manners and the appearance of the store. No matter how busy we were, we had certain standards that simply had to be maintained.

The store has undergone a relocation over the past couple of years and has moved 500 metres east from its original position.
This evening my brother and I went to the store to pick up a treat for our children. The quality of the service that we experienced was so poor that we left the store and drove seven kilometres to a different McDonald’s store.

Let me explain our experience. Upon our arrival into the restaurant we lined up behind one person. He appeared to be waiting for his order as he had a drink already in his hand. Another small queue had formed at the other end of the counter and another two people had also created a third queue in the middle of the counter. Given it was 7pm the queues seemed rather small.

As my younger brother had also worked at McDonald’s as a teenager we were both amazed at the state of the restaurant. Tables were dirty. The staff appeared disheveled in their uniforms, we did not see a single staff member smile, and after the gentleman before us in the queue left after a brief argument with one of the staff we waited ten minutes without being served nor having any staff member acknowledge our presence. Each of the three queues started to get longer and the people in each of the queues started looking at each other, wondering what was going on.

After a little longer my brother suggested that we leave. I agreed. It was clear that the service standards at this store were not up to our expectations (and I would suggest that they probably weren’t up to the standards expected by McDonald’s either.). My brother then drove seven kilometres to the North Road store in Murrumbeena South. Our experience could not have been more different at that store.

As we entered the store was clean. A young staff member greeted us with a smile. Both my brother and I had ‘special orders’ and the young man could not have been more pleasant as he processed our orders. The staff were clean and dressed in the same, clean uniforms. The staff were engaging with each other and the customers and our orders were filled quickly and we were on our way. Exactly as we had expected.

For me an experience such as this highlights the power of a local store culture. While we were waiting for our orders to be processed one of the young female counter staff immediately went out into the restaurant to clean some tables. As soon as some new customers entered the store she immediately went to the service counter to serve them. Everything about the two stores could not have been more different. There literally was a different ‘feel’ about them.

My assumption is that each franchised McDonald’s store is expected to operate according to the same standards created and expected by McDonald’s Corporate. So how could our experience at the two stores be so different. I should also note that my brother has had several poor experiences at the Clayton North store, so our experience was not a single event.

The owners and management of the Clayton North store really have a local cultural issue on their hands. The service standards at the store are not up to standard. Full stop. Our expectations were not met, and this is where service excellence starts. Organisations have to understand the expectations of the people they serve and then do everything possible to meet or exceed those expectations. I doubt that McDonald’s Corporate would be proud of what is happening to their brand at that store. Improvements are possible. In fact I’d enjoy the opportunity to help the store owners and management to once again achieve the high standards of service excellence that were once the trademark of the Clayton North store. Maybe they could even visit their ‘cousins’ at the Murrumbeena store a little over seven kilometres away to see what they are doing. After all I suspect that both stores are operating from the same set of service standards. The difference may lie in how the owners, management and staff at each store understand the expectations of their customers. Differences in that level of understanding are often reflected in the local culture of a store and affect how the service standards are implemented. Ultimately the local culture of a store is represented in the quality of the customer experience.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Career-Professionals, Service Excellence, students, Village Cinemas Australia, What Matters, What Really Matters

A not-so-service-excellent experience

Introduction
The purpose of sharing this story is to highlight just how easy it is for organisations to easily and quickly perform below expectations. Usually the core reasons for performing below customer expectations lie between a lack of balance between passionate staff and appropriate systems & processes to support those staff. Below is a story based on my perceived service experience. It is therefore biased because it only contains my side of the story. This is okay because that is how service works. All of us are trying to meet or exceed the expectations of our customers (or use a different word if the word ‘customer’ does not work for you) based on their perception of their experience with our organisations.

I am not going to reveal in this blog what I think the Village Cinema organisation and the specific staff members involved could have done to improve our service experience. Rather I am going to leave that open to your suggestions. Consider yourselves consultants and you have been brought in by Village Cinemas to review this case and to help them to understand whether or not there is anything that they could do to improve their service levels. The research on Employability Skill development recommends that leadership (which includes ‘systems thinking’ skills), problem solving, communication and enterprise skills incorporate the skills necessary to provide service excellence. In this context I’m going to tell you the story of our experience and then leave it open to you to practice the above-mentioned skills to make suggestions in the comments sections about what both Village Cinemas and the specific staff involved could have done to enhance our experience.

The story
My wife, Michelle and I finally had an opportunity to use some gifts that we had been given for our birthdays last year. As parents with four children we have not had a night away on our own since we began our family some nine years ago. Our youngest child has just turned two years old so we thought that he’d be old enough to have relatives look after him and our other three children while we went away overnight. The hotel is located in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs and is situated amongst a substantial shopping and cafe precinct. We had chosen this time to go away because it corresponded with our 13th wedding anniversary. Our gifts included an overnight hotel stay including breakfast and a late check out and Village Cinema Gold Class tickets. The hotel in which we were booked is literally 100 meters from the Village Cinema complex so we decided to take the opportunity to use both gifts at the same time.

After having had a very smooth check in process at the hotel in the early afternoon, Michelle and I decided to wander down to the cinema to see if we could book some seats at the cinema. We were aware that because the Gold Class seats were limited it was possible that there might not be any seats available that evening, so we were also prepared to book seats for the following day. Prior to leaving our hotel room we noticed that the expiry date stamped on the Gold Class tickets was 1 month and three days prior. We had not noticed this date before. We decided that we would immediately draw the attention of the staff to the date and offer to ‘pay the difference’ between the value of the tickets and any price increase that may have occurred since the tickets had been originally purchased. Our confidence was high that a simple solution could be found to this problem.

On arrival to the cinema there was no queue and we were able to immediately approach one of the two sales staff working at the booking counter. We quickly explained our situation including the fact that we were using gifts provided to us from the previous year and that we were celebrating our wedding anniversary, this being our first overnight stay on our own since we had started a family. We highlighted the date issue and asked if anything could be done to help us. The first sales clerk told us that she, “…didn’t think it would be a problem” but felt that she needed to refer us to her manager who was sitting beside her. We were ‘swapped’ with the customers that the manger was serving and we once again explained our story. As accurately as I can recall the following conversation took place. “G” represents when I was speaking, “M” when Michelle was speaking and “VC” when the manager representing Village Cinemas was speaking.

VC: “Yes, we automatically provide one months grace from the actual expiry date on the gift vouchers. Unfortunately you are three days over that grace period and they won’t let me authorise it. The only way for you to use the vouchers now is to call them (hands us a card with a 1300 number on it).”

M: “But we are here now and we’d like to solve the problem now. We are happy to pay the price difference if there has been a price rise since the vouchers were purchased”

VC: “Oh, the price isn’t the issue.”

M: “What is?”

VC: “They won’t let me approve it. As I said you’ll have to call them using the number on the card that I have provided you.”

G: “Who are “they”?”

VC: “Oh, our corporate office.”

G: “I don’t understand how it is that you refer to them as if you and them are separate. To me ‘you’ are both Village Cinemas and we’d prefer to be able to sort this out now. We don’t want to have to wait for the corporate office to sort this out because we might not be here by the time they sort it out. Surely this isn’t that hard. The vouchers have been paid for and we are happy to pay more if there has been a price increase. We don’t think that we are being unreasonable.”

VC: “I’m sorry. It’s the policy. There is nothing that I can do.”

M: “There is no-one else here that you could call for assistance?”

VC: “Yes, but they won’t say anything different to me.”

M: “Would you mind calling that person please.”

VC: (picking up the phone) “Ok.” Dials number and the call is answered as the manager says, “Hi! We don’t accept overdue vouchers do we.” (from our perspective this was said more as a statement than a question.) The manager proceeds with a couple of “Uh huh”s and hangs up the phone.

VC: “I’m sorry, as I said you have to call the 1300 number on the card.”

G: “Why do we have to call them? They are part of Village Cinemas like you are so I don’t understand why we have to call them. Do you mind calling for us?”

VC: “You have more of a chance to be successful with them than me.”

M: “So that’s it then?”

VC: “Yes.”

We left the counter highly disappointed with our experience. It seemed that there had been little effort to solve the problem. In fact from our perspective we had been the only ones who had offered a timely solution and that had been quickly pushed aside.

Reluctantly we decided to call the number on the card that we had been provided. The clerk who answered our call informed us that it was not possible to solve this problem over the phone and that the only way that the problem would be solved was by sending an email to an address that was also provided on the card (the phone number was literally 20 times the size of the email address) and that it would take a minimum of three days for a response to our email.

We both decided that we would skip the cinema and not let our poor experience with Village Cinemas ruin our overnight stay and decided to use our time doing a different activity and we went ten pin bowling (that proved to be a great time!).

Solutions
You are now providing consulting advice to both Village Cinemas and the staff members involved. Your advice to Village Cinemas may include strategic advice regarding their systems and processes. Your advice to the specific staff members may include your suggestions regarding how they could have managed our experience so that Michelle and I didn’t walk away feeling like our experience could have and should have been better.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Leadership, Professionals, Service Excellence, Teamwork, What Matters, What Really Matters

How ‘little ideas’ can make a BIG difference when times are tough

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Recently I had the good fortune to perform an assessment on a division of a large financial organisation for the Customer Service Institute of Australia (CSIA). As both a Senior Assessor with CSIA and through our our own OTM Service Strategy I have had the opportunity to observe many organisations who are striving to deliver great service to their customers.

More and more organisations have recognised the importance of treating their staff as their Number 1 customers (see the blog Providing Great Service Means That Your Staff Come First, Not Your Customersposted on http://studentsthatmatter.ning.com) and there is a strong link between that approach to employees and the provision of great service. I also observed a number of terrific little practices that have produced significant cost savings and efficiencies for the organisation’s with whom I have been working.

The team from the financial organisation that I assessed last week shared a couple of significant results from implementing ‘little ideas’. Last year the staff in the call centre were required to complete eight weeks of overtime leading up to the end of financial year. With 120 staff in the Call Centre that creates a significant salary overhead. This year only one weekend of overtime was required to complete the same amount of work with the same number of staff.

A serious question is, “How did they create such a remarkable efficiency improvement?”.

There were two ‘little ideas’ that drive the response to this question. The first was that over the past year they have created a work allocation system that more evenly distributes work, including ensuring that the work performed by the more senior staff in ‘coaching’ other staff is recorded as ‘real work’ for the coaches. In the past this work was not recorded as ‘real work’ for the more experienced staff so their system included a dis-incentive for experienced staff to share their knowledge. As part of a continuous improvement program where staff submit suggestions, a simple idea to change the system so that the ‘coaches’ were recognised for their ‘coaching’ significantly changed the behaviour of those people. The resultant behavioural change also meant that less experienced staff started to access knowledge far more quickly than they had previously been able to access existing knowledge. The result was that new staff were more quickly gaining the right knowledge at the right time which enabled them to become more efficient in their work.

The second ‘little idea’ that has caused a major efficiency improvement for the team was as simple as pressing a button. Through the continuous improvement program that the Call Centre has created for its staff, one of the team members noticed that each of the 120 computers in the Call Centre took five minutes to ‘boot up’ at the start of each day. There are a number of security firewalls that cause the slow boot-up time but these are considered necessary by the institution for security purposes. One of the staff who arrived early every morning decided that while her computer was ‘booting up’ she would spend the five minutes walking around and pressing buttons until all the computers were activated, rather than staring blankly at her screen.

This meant that when the other staff arrived all they had to do was log in and they could commence work immediately. If you do the math and multiply 119 computers by 5 minutes, by 5 days by 50 weeks you will discover that it adds up to over 14.3 days of extra productivity over the course of a year. Two little ideas, one big saving.

The key factor in these examples is that the organisation has created a culture where submitting ideas is considered normal. I was also shown a number of ideas that have ‘not grown legs and won’t be implemented’ and management is happy about that. From their perspective if two little ideas each year can produce such a significant benefit, then the system is working above expectations!

Another interesting perspective on this story is the way that a downturn creates innovation, if you let it. While I wasn’t provided a statistic from this organisation to support what I am about to say, my suspicion is that there a number of people still working in the call centre who might not have their jobs if the efficiency improvements had not occured. When you consider the human impact that losing your job in a downturn can create, that is a significant benefit not only for the organisation but the staff as well.

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