World Class Service: A holistic strategic approach

Welcome and good afternoon, Introduction Where I come from…. The reason for telling you all this is that I come to this session not as an academic, but as a practitioner. As someone who has been grazed, battered, bruised and sometimes exalted by the pursuit of excellence and world class service. Whilst much research has been undertaken in the field achieving world class excellence in customer service is still elusive for many. Before we do that I’d like you to turn to the piece of paper you have in front of you and write down what you and your organisation does.
Particularly in service industries, the delivery of world class customer service is paramount to profitability, the generation and maintenance of customer loyalty and support of brand. Achieving this on a consistent basis for the long term is, however, like finding the holy grail. And much like finding the holy grail, it’s not easy. The path is strewn with those who have fallen by the wayside and those who have failed to face up to the multitude of organisational trials and tribulation through which one must pass to be recognised as a world class entity in terms of customer service. But today it’s more complex than ever as Kristyna has identified. Our environment has changed. If we consider what’s happened in the last 10 or 15 years the landscape in which we provide service has shifted dramatically. Economic shifts have impacted on profitability Technology has changed the way we promote, distribute and deliver services Access to appropriate skills and labour is an issue and will become a big ticket item for all of us if not now, then in the not too distant future. Socially, we exist in a very different world than that of 15 years ago And yet many business continue to come to the pursuit of their own holy grails with little in their armoury to counter the challenges that need to be faced.
But what is it? We tend to talk about world-class customer service or excellence in customer service as if it’s self evident. I’d suggest that it’s not. So I did what we all do when stuck for an authoritative definition, I Googled it! It’s not surprising to anyone to find that there about as many variations on a definition as there are those attempting to define it. Literally tens of millions of hits popped up on that search. And that, of course, is not surprising. It could be argued that the very nature of service and the perception of the level of excellence is wholly dependent on the interaction of those creating it and those consuming it. As we have seen with the emergence of theory surrounding a service dominant logic for traditionally non-service environments, there are few organisations that should not be concerned with pursuing an interpretation of excellence in customer service as it applies to them and their customers. So rather than me providing you with a definition, lets come up with a working common understanding of what we think this thing is. Right here. Right now. Interactivity. You can accept that definition or interpret it for your own organisation.
Regardless of the ways in which you might define world class customer service or excellent customer service there are some fundamental truths that I’d like to put to you. Successful delivery of customer service not a front line issue. It is a strategic issue. Defining, delivering and the continuous improvement of service is a top down activity. It requires the careful planning, execution and review of a range of practices, strategies and behaviours both vertically and horizontally across the organisation. This can only be achieved via a top down approach. It necessarily requires the dovetailing of marketing, HR and operations management – business management activities/functions that traditionally have been quite separate entities. It requires strong and clear leadership and skilled management over the long term. Throw into that complexity the changing nature of customer demands and a dynamic and highly competitive environment and it’s no wonder that we not only have difficulty in defining it, it’s sometimes nigh on impossible to achieve it over the long term without some random lapses.
So lets look at the basic underpinning reasons as to why delivering excellence in customer service, world class service is perhaps more complex for service centred organisations such as those in hospitality and tourism. Perishable – service and service products can not be stockpiled they can’t be put on a shelf for sale tomorrow, they are time bound and once the opportunity to sell that service to a customer is gone – it’s gone. Intangible – can not be put in a box and taken away, it’s based on experience, and experience is fundamentally attached to emotion (more on this later). However, due to the intangibility of the service offering, people are relying more and more on social media, reality TV, rating sites, the collective wisdom and experiences of ‘the crowd’. What this does is makes the intangible more tangible for potential customers prior to purchase. Expectations then are formed, changed and perhaps dashed by the coming together of expectation and reality. Disconfirmation of expectation. Heterogeneous – it’s going to be different each and every time – on the part of both the provider and the consumer. This is innately complex. The same customer may have entirely different needs, wants, expectations and perceptions of the service encounter from the same service provider on differing occasions and therefore the service offering needs to be infinitely scalable and changeable. Inseparable – service can not be realised without the consumer having some input or even being a part of the production of that service. Customers are an innate and by their nature, individual element of the service product.
So given the inherent complexity and dynamism of delivering world class customer service it’s no wonder the holy grail seems like an impossible quest for some. I’d like to put this to you. Complex problems require complex responses. Again, harking back to the point before – this is a function and more importantly a responsibility of leadership and high level management. What we need to consider is not just the point at which the customer interacts with the organisation – the ‘moment of truth’ as Jan Carlzon called it, but the antecedents to each and every one of those magical ‘moments’. Those antecedents to my mind are the structures that underpin your capacity to identify what your people should do, what they can do and what they will do. When I say your people, I mean every single person inside your organisation, not just the customer facing employees. And so again, we return to the issue of innate complexity of this exercise. So lets look at what I mean by this.
Defining and delivering on your promise is the basic premise of the function, art or discipline of marketing. I mean this in it’s broadest sense. From determining the needs and wants of your customers through segmentation and other activities to developing your products to meet those demands and evaluating your success or otherwise – it all boils down to what it is you’re promising them. Is it convenience, style, status, cost effectiveness, peace of mind, extravagance, escape, social inclusion, social exclusion, whatever it is you, and importantly your people need to know about it. What I’m talking about here is not the what of your business – selling rooms, providing food and beverage, providing transport, etc (which is relatively easy to define and manage) but the underlying promise of what your service product is going to deliver on an emotional level or the WHY of your business – why are you selling rooms? I’m not talking about profit here – that’s an outcome, a result. But the purpose. Is it to provide a convenient bed before flying out on holiday or indulgent weekend for a wedding anniversary celebration? Why are you selling transport? It is the peace of mind of knowing your 14 year old son is being look after on a flight to his grandparents in Edinburgh or the speed and efficiency of getting to a business meeting in Rome with access to a place to work during transit? The service product, the promise that you sell, promote, and hopefully deliver has an underpinning emotional foundation and it is delivering on THAT I would argue is what sets world class, excellent customer service apart from simply providing the what of your business. If all you’re doing is providing the WHAT you’re just going through the motions and your customers will know it. That is process delivery not excellence in customer service – given that switching costs particularly for FITs are usually low in this sector going through the motions is not going to deliver repeat custom, word of mouth or good Trip Advisor ratings, and we all know that all that is fundamental to improved profitability. People don’t choose to engage with or buy what you do, they engage with WHY you do it. WHAT you do is simply the proof, the honouring of the promise you make to your customers. TED – material. According to Simon Sinek. Knowing and communicating and leading with the WHY is the fundamental difference between those who are perceived to be world class and the rest. Most organisations have the same access to labour, the same access to PD opportunities, the same access to information and the capacity to distribute service products. But it’s the organisations that connect and communicate with the WHY of what they do that exploit all those freely available resources for improved performance. Sinek suggests that humans are hardwired via the limbic brain to respond behaviourally to emotional constructs like trust and loyalty rather than logical constructs. So telling people about the WHAT is not enough because it’s the demonstration of the WHY that drives behaviour and therefore choice. Disney “I make people happy” story. On the paper you have been given, consider the fundamental WHY of your business. How different is it from the WHAT ? Now tell you neighbour the WHY of what you and your organisation does. Is it different?
The capacity of your people to deliver on the promises you’ve made to your customer is paramount. It’s blatantly obvious that if the WHAT and more importantly the WHY is not carried through to your customers you’ll lose them and probably unknowable potential custom. So the capability of your people is fundamental to the triumvirate of antecedents to world class customer service. But I’m not just talking about skills and knowledge here – it’s the entirety of the behavioural package that’s important. The Institute of Customer Service suggests “ UK consumers today face significantly less problems when buying goods and services than they did 5 years ago, but they are more inclined to complain when things do go wrong. The Institute's latest research report, handle with care: an analysis and toolkit to improve complaint handling, also suggests that issues with employee behaviour cause the majority of customer complaints , and warns there still remains a significant proportion of ‘silent sufferers’ that leave organisations with little opportunity to resolve issues.” Institute of Customer Service So this is where the HR piece comes in. From the very beginning – from pre-employment right (and I’m talking about a robust employer brand here) through the employee lifecycle up to and perhaps beyond the time the individual leaves your organisation they need not only know the WHAT but truly understand and carry out the WHY . Consistently. From job design, through to the suite of job description material, through recruitment and selection processes your focus should be on finding people who have the potential to honour your promises. There’s a mantra in hospitality particularly that suggests that you can train skills, but attitude is all important and that’s never been more important than in today’s environment. Getting people into your business with the right attitude, potential for appropriate engagement with your customers and the all important capacity to deal with the inherent emotional labour of frontline service roles is hard. Even in a loose labour market such as the one we have now, it’s still hard. Because despite ideas to the contrary, not everyone can do this stuff. Despite customer service roles (particularly at the frontline) traditionally being considered low skilled, low status and often low paid, it takes a special type of person to be able to do this work well over the long term. But, if you hire on attitude alone, skills and knowledge MUST be supported by the organisation from day one. Sounds like a no-brainer. On-going training and professional development is fundamental to ensuring that your people have the practical, but also the behavioural skills to deliver not only the WHAT (which is relatively easy) but the emotionally charged elements of your promise (which is much, much harder) because the holy grail is a moving target. This is, of course, highly problematic in an industry highly dependent on a contingent workforce. It’s often been said “what if invest in training my people and they leave?” The only response to that is “what if you don’t invest and they stay?”. Ritz story. How does your organisation embed the WHY into the HRM structures underpinning attracting, selecting, developing and retaining your people? Consider this and jot your ideas down on your paper and perhaps discuss with your neighbour.
Process and operations management is fundamental to the pursuit and discovery of your holy grail. Whilst there are underpinning factors such as good working conditions, social interaction, reward & recognition and a general love of the job I’d like to focus on structure and procedure for today. Clearly, not only because it provides order, structure and managerial direction to attempt to ensure consistency of the delivery of the WHAT (standard recipes, check in procedures, sequence of service, aircraft boarding and turnaround procedures) is important and underpin legal requirements. But what is often missed is that employees often work harder to overcome barriers to delivering appropriate service because of processes and poor frontline management that actually get in the way. Often, people succeed in delivering excellent service not because of, but IN SPITE of the processes and management that are supposedly in place to support service. Look at the language we use. Standard Operating Procedures. If you want stock standard operation (and in some cases organisations will) then use SOPs if you truly want to be able to customise your service provision to your customers – to recognise and accommodate the fundamental heterogeneity of what service is, look at them as support structures with a focus on purpose and outcome rather than a series of steps to be followed. If your people are truly capable of the WHAT (and they should be if you’ve done the HR bit right) then get out of their way. For example, HGC example. So, processes to achieve service failure recovery in particular need to be current, clear, simple and most importantly, immediately responsive. You need to make each one of your people response-able. Empowered to step in to make decisions in order to recover sufficiently from a service slip. We know that satisfaction after a service failure can be higher if the issue is dealt with effectively AND quickly. To do this you need to get out of the way and let your people get on with the job. Your people mostly WANT to make their customers happy, they WANT to deliver on your promises and in my experience, become disappointed and despondent when they can’t through no fault of their own. From a motivational point of view structure & process can, and often does, put barriers in the way and of course this leads to practical creep – a slow and steady deviation from standards which in the end erodes the reason why they were set up in the first place. Over time this has a profound and negative impact on your team’s capacity to continue to feel supported, motivated and emotionally prepared to take on the challenge of providing excellence to your customers. Some of you may recognise this as common sense, some of you will see it as TQM or continuous improvement or QA. It’s all of those things. Of course, I’m sure you’ll know where I’m going with this – this is the WHY element. Poorly designed standard operating practices, outdated process, inappropriate rules and regulations, frontline management incompetence chip away at the even the most enthusiastic and emotionally robust individual till they feel defeated, drained and ultimately they will disengage with the WHY, disengage with your business and essentially disengage with your customer. None of us can afford that. But clearly it happens. In some cases the individual becomes so disengaged that they actively work against both the process (the WHAT ) and the emotional (the WHY ) in order to get their ‘revenge’ on the business. I’ve seen and heard of people doing quite abhorrent things in hotels in an effort to ‘punish’ their employers for making them so miserable. And of course we know that once a few people have this attitude it spreads like a disease throughout the organisation and starts to rot away at any concept of service. Disney story. What structures are actually supportive of the WHY rather than the WHAT in your organisation? Which ones do you know of get in the way? How are you going to find out what’s making your team’s job more difficult than it needs to be? Jot that down on your paper.
So, how does all this come together? In reality - very superficially in most organisations. It’s hard. It’s clearly difficult to go right back to the beginning to the marketing function and plot every thing out so that it dovetails in. In most organisations, marketing doesn’t talk to HR, HR doesn’t talk to ops managers and ops managers often struggle to keep pace with maintaining standards on the coalface often in spite of what they see as evil plans from Marketing and HR to make their lives more difficult. It takes time and effort and business knowledge most importantly vision and leadership. A clearly articulated and communicated vision of the WHY as well as the WHAT. It takes determination and exquisite managerial competence to pull all this together over time. To recap then. The Should Do – Marketing - get your promise right, know why you’re doing the things that you do. Know your purpose – the WHY as well as the WHAT . The Can Do – HRM – make your people response-able, fix the processes and procedures and make them support structures and get out of the way. To do that your people not only need to be competent and capable at delivering the WHAT but emotionally engaged with the WHY . The Will Do – Ops management – make sure your managers are competent and your processes, procedures, SOPs, etc are appropriate and supportive. Fix problems, trust your people to do what they do and get out of the way. At the heart of this is the idea that underpinning support structures (including frontline management and supervision) should be robust and focus on the WHY , not necessarily the WHAT or the HOW. It’s not easy, particularly in today’s environment, and perhaps it’s a different way of looking at things that are absolutely familiar. There is no secret here, you probably knew all this. And people have told me that. But I’d have to ask if you’ve not achieved the holy grail – world class, excellence in customer service over the long term to achieve higher than average returns – why? Where are the gaps, what’s not fitting, and why do organisations continue to subscribe to the mediocre.
In an environment where the concept of the lifetime customer has become a fallacy, where switching costs are low, where the wisdom of crowds informs purchase decisions, and feedback is immediate and potentially global we need to ask ourselves if we want to take on the crusade. How do we take on all the perils and tribulations that come with seeking and achieving the holy grail and fundamentally shift our focus, our practices and our behaviour? You don’t need to do this, but if you do and succeed, oh what service splendour awaits!! Thanks. Questions.
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World Class Service: A holistic strategic approach

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