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Service Excellence + Process Excellences - A marriage made in heaven or a road to hell?

Why is it that so many manufacturers make great products that are incredibly reliable, yet deliver a service experience that is flawed? We see this everywhere - a car that hardly ever goes wrong but a routine service experience that’s awful, a laptop that’s fantastic but a helpline that’s anything but helpful, or a mobile phone that’s bursting with new technology but a support line from the dark ages. It’s something that’s interested (and irritated) me for a long while so as someone that has a passion for helping organisations deliver service excellence I decided to investigate.  

Over the past year or so I’ve had the opportunity to work on service improvement projects with a variety of different manufacturers and I think I now know some of the reasons why these anomalies occur. I’ve also had the opportunity to test and learn what works, so I have a few suggestions for anyone interested in addressing what I think are the key issues.

I’m convinced that the problem results from the way manufacturers approach improvement projects. They are usually highly skilled in the application of process improvement techniques, like Lean and Six Sigma, so they understandably turn to them when confronted with the challenge of improving a service experience. These approaches are undoubtedly excellent for what they were designed for, improving a process, but they are not as good at improving a service experience; which they may have been adapted for, but were not designed for. 

I’ve therefore found that this ‘process improvement’ approach to ‘service improvement’ can create the following issues.  

There are two key elements in any service experience – competence and character. Competence is the efficiency, accuracy, speed, value for money, etc., of the product and/or transaction; character is the friendliness, honesty, attitude, ease of use, etc., of the systems and people conducting the transaction. Competence is a science; character is an art. Competence requires the use of your head; character requires the use of your heart. And that is the crux of this first issue. 

Technical people will have been hired, and perhaps promoted to senior positions, because they are great at using their head for science. It’s natural to them, they love doing it, they’ve probably studied it and have qualifications and maybe even won awards for doing it. But using their heart for an art does not come as naturally to them. It perhaps makes them feel uncomfortable and awkward, and therefore it’s something they would probably prefer to avoid if possible. So they tend to develop systems that are very efficient ……but dull, perfect …….but boring, slick ……but heartless.

Worse still, they often assume that so long as the process is right, it doesn’t matter if the person delivering it to the customer isn’t. So they invest lots of time and effort into removing variances and/or inaccuracies from the product or process but don’t then go on to ensure the customer service people are as ‘fit for purpose’ with a ‘natural’ service ability and have the training and resources to do it superbly.

So the nature, training and experience of technical people can easily make them blind to the fact that the character element of any service experience is just as important as the competence (many service specialists would argue it is more important).

The goal is not to replace the science based approach with an emotional one, it is just to ensure that both key components, competence and character, are given equal prominence. 

I’ve found that in all the organisations I’ve helped, there are always a few people that ‘get’ the emotional, character stuff. Often though, because they are surrounded by people that don’t get it, and maybe resist or mock it, they go native and keep their emotional side hidden in order to ‘blend in’. The key is to find them, ensure they have equal status on the planning and implementation teams, give them tools and techniques to work with that will help them find and develop the emotional customer connections and then encourage and recognise the part they are playing. 

It’s also vital to include questions about the character element and/or overall experience of any service delivered in any customer surveys. Questions like-

• How did we make you feel as a customer?
• What will you remember most about the experience?
• How likely are you to recommend us to others?

If you’re an engineer, a scientist, or an accountant you love numbers, formulae, measurements, and analysis. That’s probably why you chose that profession. So when you decide something needs improving, the first thing you do is measure and analyse, looking for the facts that prove what you should do and why you should do it. There’s nothing wrong with that, service experience improvements benefit from good analysis; but to make a really worthwhile difference, they need something more. They also need imagination, creativity, and experimentation, and this is the core of issue two. 

The natural and understandable approach of manufacturers is to over analyse any service improvement challenge. This can result in paralysis, because the precise proof of what needs to be done often can’t be found. I’ve also seen it lead to the death of good projects, because people got fed up and lose interest through doing nothing practical.  

This is not the fault of the ‘analysts’, it’s just what they’ve been trained to do. It’s their standard approach which works really well in process improvement projects. But it’s too narrow an approach for service improvement projects, where it’s difficult to predict how customers will react to something they haven’t previously experienced. Experience shows that the best approach is a blend of analysis and experimentation to find what customers prefer. So you should be continually testing ideas and developing new techniques that will create the desired results.

There’s nothing wrong with doing some measuring and analysing, it’s a good way to find where best to focus attention, the key is to ensure that it is used as a step towards taking some worthwhile action and doesn’t become the only action that is taken. 

So as soon as the results of any analysis start to show through, get people thinking of as many ideas for improvements as they can and then ensure they go and test them with customers to find the ones that work best. Then run with the ones that work and either improve or ditch the ones that don’t and move on to others. 

What’s important is to quickly find things that show success (‘quick wins’). They give a boost to morale, show the efforts are worthwhile and encourage people to carry on and perhaps start tackling the things that may take longer but will be worth the extra effort in the long run.

One of the widely used process improvement techniques is Six Sigma. It was designed to remove unwanted variation from processes so that the outcome could be predicted and replicated. And it’s really good at it. So whenever there is unwanted variation in a service process, for example if the time to answer queries from customers can take anything from minutes to days, or if invoices aren’t always accurate, then this is a good tool to use to find and fix the root cause(s) of these problems. 

But in service delivery there are times when we want variation and we don’t want to impose strict rules or routines to make things the same every time. Those are the times when we want well chosen, well trained and well equipped front line people to use their good judgement and do what they think is the right thing to do for the customer. In those circumstances all they need is simple but well chosen guidelines. 

Organisations that are used to implementing a ‘no variations’ approach to their business find the very thought of this uncomfortable. They feel they should know and be able to control and predict everything that happens between their organisation and their customers. But for customers to experience great service, good variation is vital, so getting used to and comfortable with it is vital too.

I’ve found that the best way to deal with the issue is to agree where the line should be between predictability and spontaneity. Make it clear what are the things that must always be the same, no matter what customer or what circumstance, and establish the rules and routines for these. But also agree what are the times when good judgement is needed and create some sensible, outcome focussed, as loose as possible guidelines for these. Guidelines like –

•  Act as if every customer was our one and only customer.
•  Do for our customers what you would want done if you were a customer. 
•  Do what you think is right to make the customer pleased with the outcome.

Guidelines like this mean that there will be variations in some aspects of the service delivery. But in the right circumstances that’s a good thing. All people and all companies are different, so all customers and all situations are different too. It therefore makes sense that some responses to customers and situations should also be different. And the best people to decide what those differences should be are well chosen, well trained and well equipped front line people.

Also remember that by allowing people the opportunity to make ‘judgement calls’ they may occasionally get it wrong or not do it the way you would. But that should be OK so long as they had the right intentions, they quickly correct the mistake, they don’t try to hide it and they learn from it so it won’t happen again. 

Manufacturers and systems specialists are trained to look for things going wrong and then fix them. It’s a technique that works and is an excellent way of edging ever closer to a perfect system or process. But it’s based on an assumption that doesn’t apply in the same way to service delivery because it does not create the positive actions necessary to replace what is wrong, awful or bad with what would be right, good or great. That’s because removing a negative does not create a positive and when you stop being bad you don’t become good, you just become not bad. And what’s not bad is not good enough to create loyal customers. For that you need to deliver something that customers’ view as at least good and ideally great. 

In their research to establish what customers’ view as World Class service, Warwick University discovered that ‘Going the Extra Mile’ for a customer was an essential ingredient. Whether you call this ‘delivering beyond expectation’, or ‘exceeding expectations’ or any other similar phrase is unimportant. What matters is that people understand why this should be done and are then encouraged and empowered to not only deliver what customers were promised and/or reasonably expected, but then to deliver something more, which they didn’t expect. 

So fixing things going wrong is a necessary technique, but it’s not sufficient to create the kind of service that will make customers loyal for the long term. Smart businesses have therefore found many ways to deliver these unexpected extras in ways that have little or no cost to them but have high value to their customers.

This article has the subtitle ‘A marriage made in heaven or a road to hell?’ My experience suggests that if the challenges are approached correctly this is definitely a marriage made in heaven. 

The opportunities for technically based businesses to use service as a source of differentiation and competitive advantage are I believe, immense; especially in today’s ever more competitive markets.  It’s also a fact that in most markets, if one supplier gets a reputation for having a service experience that is substantially better than the competitors, it can lead to many other worthwhile business benefits. 

I would therefore encourage all leaders to investigate this and discover for themselves how they too could make service excellence a key element of their competitive strategy.

© copyright Chris Daffy