Service Excellence – Release Your Service Mindset

Fundamental to delivering service excellence is a belief in people and their indisputable power of serving others. We are not referring to the power over others. Rather, we are talking about the effect you can have on others through your actions of relating or responding to them for a positive outcome. 

There is nothing wrong with serving or learning to serve others. Learning to feel and care for others. In fact, it is a virtue to be cherished.  Perhaps we have had too much of a good life that we have forgotten about others around us other than ourselves. If you like to be served, as many of us do, do you not think others would love to have you do the same for them too? 

It is not impossible for us to excel in service. Afterall, we are a people known for our obsession with world class practices, across all industries and institutions, and have done well in many of these areas. It will be sad if we come this far with our hardware but void of the other heartware. Wouldn’t it be nice to have foreign friends and visitors say our country is “warm, friendly and hospitable” instead of the usual just “clean and green city”? Equally important is to also extend service excellence to our own kind so that we grow into a more gracious and caring society. 

Wherever you are, wherever you go, you can choose to create the ideal environment for interaction that creates a positive experience for you and others around you. Having that mindset will shape your attitude and determine your response. Your tone of voice will be more positive and engaging. You will be ready to listen and will come across as caring and concern. You will begin to smile more often. 

Remember that service is interaction between two or more people. It is about building relationships between you and others. You can make the choice to respect the other person and treat her as you would have her treat you, and your attitude and behaviour will naturally reflect that commitment.

Service Taboo – Putting Customer On Hold

Have you ever been put on hold or kept waiting when you called a company? How did you feel as a customer?

This is a sure killer. If your corporate music or marketing message comes on while your customer is on hold, your customer will become delirious.

Recently, I called XYZ for a cab to make a booking as I needed to get to a downtown office for a very important meeting with a client. When I got through and before I could say five words, I was put on hold. An automated voice came on, “Thank you for calling XYZ. All our lines are busy at the moment. Your call is important to us. Our service representative will attend to you shortly. Please hold.”

This message was repeated eight times as I was kept waiting for more than two minutes. I hung up and made a fresh call. The same thing happened again! Guess what? I simply hung up and called another company!

Did the company really value their customer call as important? Was that a good customer experience for me? You know the answer. Am I likely to forget especially when this has happened before with the same company? Not likely. In fact, you can be sure I will tell many other people about this bad experience.

Businesses need to remember that when a customer is put on hold for ten seconds, it probably is too long a wait. If the customer is kept waiting for longer, it will certainly feel like an eternity. Customer-centric organizations know the importance of setting service standards and meeting or exceeding them.

Transform Your Business

Focus on delivering customer satisfaction to achieve your long-term business goal

 

Another of my article is featured in CATS Recruit Section, page C30, of The Straits Times today, 17 June 2009. We have it reproduced here below for your reading pleasure.

Businesses will need to manage the process of cost reduction well to ensure that they do not unwittingly compromise their product quality or service standards. Cost-cutting is a short-term strategy. It is far more important that companies take a long-term view to build and strengthen their organisation and its capabilities now, positioning themselves for the eventual economic recovery.

Over the years, businesses have worked hard to win customers to get to where they are today. To lose their customers now would be tragic indeed. Studies have shown that it costs up to six times more money to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. In the slow economy, it would probably cost even more to win a new account.

Businesses must have an unrelenting focus on delivering the best customer experience. There must be the line of sight from the top to the bottom of the organisation. Take care of that and you will enjoy customer loyalty – and revenues and profitability will follow. Many companies find that 20 per cent of their customers provide over 80 per cent of their revenue. Thus, high levels of repeat customers will lead to high levels of profit.

To achieve that, companies must remain constantly vigilant about the changing requirements of their customers, understand their business models and the markets they operate in, know what their customers want and deliver these to help their customers succeed.

Achieving excellence

To achieve business excellence, everyone in the organisation needs to focus on delivering customer satisfaction by taking personal responsibility for improving processes and be empowered to make changes.

Departments need to become self-managed teams; cross-functional teams are needed at the company level; and the organisation needs to be flatter and more efficient for faster decision-making and response. When the company finds a problem or an opportunity for improvement outside, they need to collaborate to find the solution.

For that to happen and for that change to be successful and sustainable, a holistically integrated approach to business excellence, which engages all parts and elements of the organisation and its leadership, is required.

Leadership for change

Executives must lead the change process, the thinking about productivity and quality to learning to create a company that consistently delivers high value and customer satisfaction.
They must establish a culture of continuous improvement that seeks to remove bottlenecks, eliminate sources of wastes and customer dissatisfaction, and become more efficient and more effective.

There must be a focus on reducing cycle time, rapidly transferring knowledge and delighting the customer – these help the company to maintain its competitive edge.

Management must also be able to spot changing customer preferences, be aware of the changing competitive landscape, harness advances in technology, seize opportunities and implement new solutions rapidly.

Product and service standards have to stretch from the top to the bottom of the organisation and need to cut across all departmental lines. The organisation’s own learning and development process must be structured, systematic and focused on building on its strength. Critical systems that support hiring, training, recognition, career advancement and information access need to be in place.

Employee engagement

Organisations can reorganise, downsize and streamline their way to efficiency. These approaches are necessary but often not sufficient to catapult organisations into high performance mode because they neglect one essential component of performance – engaging employees in their work.

To mobilise the entire organisation, leaders must ask for employees’ inputs and their involvement, especially in areas that need improvement. Unfortunately, in modern day continuous improvement process this step is often missed which causes communication and ownership problems that hinder success. Employees must be trained and equipped to go from “good to great”.

Total approach needed

For companies to be successful in their business, they need to be responsive to their customers’ needs at every step of the business process involving every function, employee and leader. Anything short of a total approach is unlikely to deliver the desired outcomes.

Organisational transformation is a long-term process requiring a fundamental change in management practices and culture – a paradigm shift.

Finally, the organisational direction that advocates the strategic intent has to be clear about the objectives that needs to be achieved, the type of values and capabilities that are needed and how all this is going to be implemented for successful change to occur.

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P.S. To find out more about this topic, Register NOW and enjoy early bird discounted fee (by 19 June 2009) for our 2-day workshop at ST701 Professional Development Workshop to be held on 29 & 30 June 2009. Please log on to www.jobs.st701.com or email to st701@sph.com.sg. Alternatively, you may also call 6319 5979 / 6319 5923.