In my experience, in industry across industry, companies are increasingly frustrated and disappointed. Whether customers, employees or business owners – no one wants to deliver bad service, but that is what is being experienced.
So why is that? Well, what I have observed is that poor service is not born from attitude and effort, but from conscious choices made in defining a company’s business model. It’s easy to throw service into a vision statement and periodically do whatever it takes to make a customer happy. What is hard is designing a service model that allows average employees, not just the top performers, to produce service excellence as part of their everyday routine. Those company’s with a ‘wow’ service create a proposition, systems, and culture that set their team up to excel effortlessly.
However, you can’t be good at everything. In services, trying to do it all brilliantly will lead almost inevitably to mediocrity. Excellence requires sacrifice. To deliver great service on the dimensions that your customers value most, you must underperform on dimensions they value less. This means you must have the accept some things are done badly.
Additionally, you cannot create a business model that is based on the belief that all of your team will perform at the highest level, all day, every day, for an indefinite period. For a system to work, excellence must be normalised. And you don’t get to that point by demanding extraordinary sacrifice. You get there by designing a system where the full spectrum of your employees, not just the outstanding ones, will have no choice but to deliver excellence as part of their daily routine. Great service is not made possible by running the business harder and faster on the backs of a few extraordinary people. It’s made possible, profitable, sustainable, scalable by designing a system that sets up everyone to excel.
Once you accept the idea of trade-offs and break the addiction to service heroes the inputs into service excellence are much easier to understand. Below I summarise the four service truths, which are the assumptions behind the basic elements of great service.
1. You can’t be good at everything. Excellence requires underperforming on the dimensions your customers value least so that you can over-perform on the dimensions your customers value most. Once you choose this path, the decision on where to be good and bad should by driven by a deep insight into your customers needs.
2. Someone has to pay for it. Service excellence must be funded in some way. You can find an acceptable way to charge your customers more for it, reduce costs while improving your service experience, or get customers to do some of the work for you. Choosing among these strategies, the precise mix will depend on your business, industry dynamics and the specific relationship you desire to have with your customers.
3. It’s not your employees’ fault. Your people matter, in the way you’ve designed your service systems, in particular, the way the system sets up the average team member to excel as a matter of routine.
4. You must manage your customers. You must be deliberate about involving your customers in creating, not just consuming, your service experience. To put it another way, you also need a management plan for your customers
Finally, leadership, at its core, is about making other people better as a result of your presence and making sure that the impact lasts in your absence. As a leader, you create the conditions for others, and you do what it takes to sustain those conditions, even when you’re not in the room. Designing good systems is part of this “absentee leadership,” but the most powerful tool you have, by far, is culture. Culture not only guides individual decision-making, but also provides the foundation for all other organisational behavior and action. In other words, culture doesn’t just tell you what to do, it shows you how to think.
In summary I leave you with this formula for Outstanding Service
Outstanding Service = Systems × Culture
