For organisations providing a service to customers (ie. most organisations), there will be times when the service delivery doesn’t match the customer’s expectations. This occurs when the customer’s expectations are not clearly understood or managed.

Organisations that are specifically service-based, differ from those that manufacture products. In both instances, there is a requirement that needs to be satisfied. However, while we can measure when a product is delivered, or if it meets a design criteria, we often struggle to quantify if a service is satisfactorily delivered. In many instances, we don’t even try; we don’t know how many repeat customers we have or how many went elsewhere and never return after experiencing our service.

In delivering a service to your customers, do you ask if they are satisfied? Do you do this as a matter of course? Is it part of your standard procedure? If you don’t, how would you do this? What opportunities do you have to solicit their feedback?

The answers to these questions will depend in part on the actual service you are providing. The duration of the interaction you have with your customer will impact on your capacity to seek their feedback. For example, how much time do you spend with a customer in identifying their needs and then fulfilling them? After you have delivered your service, how long does your interaction with the customer last? Do they have the opportunity to assess the service and provide feedback before you break contact with them? Do you conduct any additional follow up with them?

For example, as customers, we can easily identify when a meal is not to our expectation. We can readily identify our concerns to the restaurant staff. If the fuel economy on our car is excessive following a routine service, do we identify this to our mechanic? Do we even know? If we are a tour operator, the perception of customers at the beginning of their holiday may well be different than at the end of their holiday. How do we capture that? As customers, when do we decide that a service is not adequate? It may be almost immediately, or it may be some days or even weeks later.

As a provider of services, we need to identify that our customers may not be in a position to assess our service delivery for some time. When our customer’s expectations are not met, what do we need to do to recover this failure? What strategies do we have in place for effective service recovery? Do we provide a service guarantee? Is it effective?

The first rule of service quality is to do it right the first time. But we need to remain receptive to feedback and the opportunities to solicit additional feedback even after the financial transaction is completed. And when things do go wrong we need to act quickly to fix them and be in a position to provide solutions. We need to remain aware that the opportunity to fix issues has a very finite window – the service recovery window. Our capacity to provide solutions where and when they are identified is incredibly important for maintaining our customer relationships. How we manage service failures and our response, will directly impact our future business and our bottom line.

The key to minimising service failures is in having a clear understanding of our customer’s (every changing) expectations. If we are actively seeking to continuously improve our service delivery, then the number of potential dissatisfied customers should be few. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that we can perceive all possible points of failure and just hoping that things won’t go wrong. Rather it is necessary to have a plan of what actions we will take when service failures do occur.

To discuss customer service strategies, service recovery or placing the customer at the centre of your business, go to our contact page.

Stephen Nicholson
Principal Consultant

Do you struggle with maintaining your HR skills records or training records?

Then take a look at the template on our downloads page. It’s an Excel template designed to help document and track the skills of your personnel and their training requirements.

Note that it utilises conditional formatting that was introduced with Excel 2007, so you will need to have this version or later to open it.

Also available is a slightly less functional version for Excel 2003. If you require a copy, then please request this on the contacts page.

In August, the CPP training team is returning to Australia.

The Certified Business Process Professional is a program run by the BPGroup.org

This BPM program is a practical, comprehensive approach to creating and managing business processes to enhance performance and provide sustained results.

In August, levels 1 through 5 are being run in various cities across Australia.

If August is not convenient, the next programs are being run in November.

For more details, see the following links:

Perth
Sydney
Melbourne
Adelaide

“In business, there’s no such thing as a perfect 10″

In this article, Richard Branson talks about his success and why it’s important to “look at your business or brand from the outside in”.

There’s always room for improvement in product and service offerings. By placing ourselves in our customer’s shoes, we can understand their experience and optimise our product delivery from their point of view; leading to an improved outcome for our customers.

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/after_hours/opinions/article.jsp?content=20100510_10003_10003

Last month I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the BP Group Certified Process Process Professional program in Brisbane. For me, this was the opportunity to follow up the three day program I attended in Melbourne late last year.

As expected, there were a great group of attendees, from diverse backgrounds. Despite the various experiences, everyone present was tied to the one goal of improving business processes.
How to:
- increase revenue;
- reduce costs; and
- improve customer service.

Steve Towers demonstrated proven, practical methods and tools for advanced business process improvement and realising the above benefits by refocusing on successful customer outcomes (SCOs) using an “Outside In” strategy.

As one of the attendees in Brisbane has commented -
“I still find it incredible that in this conventional information and process rich world we live in that we can look at what we do in a slightly different but totally logical way and the picture changes (so) dramatically.” Charles Bennett, Managing Partner & Project Director at IBS Publishing

Many companies say that they are “customer focused”, but most fail to really put themselves in their customers’ shoes and deliver real solutions for their customers’ needs. This is where the methods and tools of the Certified Process Professional (CPP) Program can make a tangible difference to how you look at the business processes in your organisation.

If you are looking to improve your own professional skills in business process management and business process improvement, then I would recommend the Advanced Business Process Methods and Techniques of the Business Process Professional program by BP Group.

Stephen Nicholson
Certified Process Professional – Master

Search for other BPM and Outside In postings on this site.