Ben:
At 13:54 19/10/1997 -0600, Benjamin B. Compton wrote:
>In the service industry quality can only be measured after the fact. When
>I've got an engineer talking to a customer live, and they give out
>inaccurate technical information I can't discover it until after the fact.
>There is no way I can "pull" the answer from going out. It's gone as soon
>as the words are spoken. And it is a rather difficult thing to find out
>who is giving out inaccurate information and who is not. Polling customers
>works to a degree, but many of the customers don't even know the
>information they were given is false.
A close friend is chairman of a $6 billion dollar services firm that
continues to grow at net 10% a year. Their core competency is a service
delivery model and mindset that puts 'product' firms to shame. Besides
talking about how he grows his top line in supposedly mature segments, we
talk a lot about service delivery. Your post prompted me pass along the
essentials that always come up:
The production of, and delivery of, services is instantaneous - there's no
time to QA the "process" of production. The essentials have to be there
in the line staff in advance of the need of the "product."
The customer's anticipation of the services event and the recovery from
disaster were two key elements. The client rarely expects you to be
perfect all the time, and will forgive an error is the recovery is
excellent.
The need to focus on first and second line supervisors - turnover is too
high in many segments so the effort is put into this hands-on supervisory
level.
The firm is relentless in using all means to capture best practices and to
cross-pollinate those practices to other operating groups - while all
groups still achieve their financial targets.
The firm couples highly centralized financial controls (a significant
portion of its revenues are in cash) with highly decentralized profit
centers (thousands of them) - and those profit centers are given vague
guidance as to how to achieve them. Groups must learn the best practices
of others in order to be successful.
Best regards, Gordon Housworth
Intellectual Capital Group
ghidra@modulor.com
Tel: 248-626-1310
http://www.modulor.com
--Gordon Housworth <ghidra@modulor.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>