Imagine that your company picks up the tab for you to eat lunch at a particular restaurant every day (that does take some imagination, doesn’t it?). Now, this restaurant is a nice place with table service. So far, so good.
Some days, the host warmly greets you by name and seats you immediately at your favorite table in the sunny corner. Other days, you stand at the entrance for ten minutes, get a grunt from the host and get seated after waiting another ten minutes. Then you find yourself right smack dab in front of the swinging doors to the kitchen. Even worse, on other days, no one greets you, and you have to go find an empty table, and probably end up at one you have to wait to be cleaned. Then you learn the kitchen is out of most items you like. No wonder no one was eager to seat you.
What’s good about this restaurant? It’s free! Remember?
But if it weren’t, wouldn’t you be a lot more likely to spend your own money there if it treated you well all the time instead of making your lunch hour some kind of culinary Russian roulette?
Consistently good service isn’t an accident. It comes from standardizing your approach to it. That means leaving nothing to chance or to the mood or whims of employees.
You’re about to discover how to assure consistently great service through standardization, which basically breaks into:
Before leaping into how you can create the standards that assure your customers great service, let’s take a quick look at why standards are so critical.
Customer service is often provided in brief interactions that only last for a few seconds at a time. Just seconds! But the impact could last a lifetime. That’s because customers make emotional judgments about a company. Any single interaction can create an impression that will forever color a customer’s attitude toward buying from your company.
Some people call this spontaneous evaluation a “moment of truth” (a phrase coined by Jan Carlzon of Scandinavian Airlines). We don’t think that term goes nearly far enough in describing the potential impact on your business. We prefer to call it “The Instant of Absolute Judgment.”
It can take years to build a reputation, but only a second to destroy it. Crushingly sad but amazingly true.
If you please a customer over and over again, she’ll probably keep coming back. Disappoint her now and then, and the loyalty bond begins to erode. The customer drifts away a little bit at a time.
Upset a customer, make her angry, or let her down with a big disappointment, and you’ll likely lose her business for the rest of her life.
You can dramatically increase the odds that your business will deliver consistently good service when you set service standards. They describe precisely how your business should achieve certain measurable service levels.
Standards should be unique to your industry and to your business in particular. To help you understand what we mean by standards, here are some examples:
Word to the Wise
Service standards are guidelines specifying measurable activities that help your employees to please customers. The standards are supported by organizing and supporting work to deliver services in a consistent fashion.
Interested in setting standards for your own organization? Great! Here are five questions to stimulate your thinking.
At this point, don’t worry about having the answers to all those questions for all your work. Right now, we’re just setting the stage for creating standards for your business.
To have a meaningful impact, service standards should meet certain, uh, standards. When you do actually start creating standards, they need to operate in a certain way to really have the impact you’re looking for. We’ve created a helpful acronym to describe effective service standards, SMARTS.
Issuing instructions to employees that say, “Be friendly to customers,” is not specific. (For example, friendly to one person could mean merely not hanging up on someone.) It is vague, broad, and open to many different interpretations. So is, “Generally, answer the phone as soon as possible.” An example of a specific standard is: When answering the phone, answer it by the second ring and say, “It’s my pleasure to serve you today. How may I help?”
Effective standards are specific as to:
You need to know if you’re achieving the goal or not. Measurable means quantifiable, like in numbers. “Credit representatives will answer incoming customer calls by the second ring 96 percent of the time,” is a specific, measurable goal.
The specific goals you set for your organization need to flow from your customers’ expectations and your current level of performance. Later in this chapter, we give you a step-by-step process for setting your specific standards.
It’s fashionable to talk about “stretch goals,” but employees need to believe they can achieve the standards. Or they won’t even try. Setting standards means far more than merely identifying the goals. Just as importantly, it means designing and supporting the work process so you can achieve the standard on an on-going basis. This could involve a major structural change to the way you currently do your work.
This is the most important characteristic. While there are a million operations you could set standards for in your company, your priority focus must be on the things that matter to customers and influence their buying decisions. Set standards for things that customers will notice and appreciate. The more relevant your standards are, the greater the likelihood your employees will implement them.
Good service is more than just the actions you take to assist customers. It’s also the time you take to serve them. Solving a problem during the customer’s first call has infinitely more value for most customers than the same outcome a month from now. Your service standards should include a goal and measure for time performance. (You’ll find an extensive method for determining the right standards for your organization later in this chapter.)
Service isn’t just the activities of customer contact people. It’s the tools, systems, and processes that support those efforts. Employees can’t be better than the system allows them to be, no matter how much the boss carries on about improving service. The standards should become an essential part of employees’ job descriptions and evaluations. Every employee, from the CEO on down, must be held accountable to these standards. If any employee is not held accountable, the standards will fall apart.
Want to create a service standard? Keep all the SMARTS points in mind, and then just fill in the simple formula that follows the example below.
To give you an idea of what the finished product looks like, we’ll start with an example from a grocery store, followed by a format you can use to create your own standards.
We will serve our customers with quick check-outs by cashiers in our express line, with a performance measure of having no more than three customers waiting in any cashier line and a target maximum wait time of under two minutes for any customer at any time. We will accomplish this objective by:
At Your Service
Even the best-intending employees may not consistently deliver great service if you don’t define what it is. Standards are not rigid rules meant to constrain behavior. Instead, they are guidelines that remove uncertainty and assure consistency. Employees can more fully invest themselves in delivering great service— with less stress and more creativity—when they know what’s expected from them.
Objective: We will serve our customers with ________________ {name the specific task goal related to customer requirements}.
Performer: By _______________ {identify who’s performing the work}.
Measure: With a performance measure of ________________ {the time, dollar, or other measures you are trying to achieve}.
Support factors: We will accomplish this objective by _______________,_______________, and _______________ {the organizational support that will make the performance improvement possible}.
When you create specific standards, you make your expectations for performance clear to your employees. You define great service in order for them to deliver it consistently.
Don was shopping for office supplies in one of the nation’s largest retail dealers. He saw a “Sale” sign over the brand of transparencies he uses to make color overheads for his management development presentations. The attractive savings made an impulse purchase virtually certain. One small catch. The sign said the savings came from an “Instant Rebate.”
What is an “Instant Rebate”? Don didn’t know, and neither did the friendly but not knowledgeable staff at the “Customer Service” counter. One thought it meant there was a rebate coupon tucked “somewhere in that rebate display over there.” Don wandered off to plow through scores of manufacturer rebate coupons strewn about the display. Finding none for the transparencies, it was back to the Service desk (and we use the term loosely here).
After three employees pleasantly said the customer service-speak equivalent of “duh,” finally the store manager was summoned. He confessed that he didn’t know what an Instant Rebate was either. But at least he had the good sense to authorize ringing up the sale on the spot with a credit for the Instant Rebate, whatever it is. Then he went down the aisle and removed the sign from the shelf.
Lesson: Good service requires a system of information, procedures, and systems. If the people charged with implementing your slogans, deals, or objectives don’t have a clue as to how to deliver on them, then they can’t please your customer.
To show you how service standards can impact an operation, let’s take a little trip together. Picture this. You’re going on a business trip to a distant city. You’re going to fly there.
In playing out this scenario, you’ll encounter several opportunities to receive great customer service or big-time disappointments.
As you read the following account, watch for the many places where the airline might want to standardize service to meet your expectations as it flies you from here to there. Follow along:
At Your Service
Every aspect of a customer’s experience might be improved by a service standard. Take nothing for granted. Physically walk through the entire customer experience and note every step, every part of the process, that could potentially disappoint or delight a customer. Great service is no accident. It results from close scrutiny— and careful management—of the total customer experience, detail by painstaking detail.
Once you are comfortably settled in your seat (it is comfortable, isn’t it?), the captain announces his appreciation for your business today. After the safety demonstration, you begin reflecting on the service you received today but never really thought about before. Unless, of course, you are in the airline business or fly more than a human should.
When you were reading about that little imaginary flight, could you see how many places service standards could come into play? Were you surprised at the many points at which the airline had an opportunity for your “Instant of Absolute Judgment?”
Could you imagine good and bad service performance levels? We’d bet that you’d have no difficulty at all in assessing the ideal level of service you should receive from an airline you fly.
Well, now that you’re all warmed up, let’s discuss creating service standards that can assure your customers receive first class service all the time. We cannot overemphasize the need for consistency here. Every negative “Instant” wipes out one or more positive “Instants.” Standards of service greatly enable you to consistently provide positive experiences.
We have shown you how to write a service standard, but there’s quite a gap between having a written standard and putting it to work in your business.
To implement your standards, follow this simple nine-step process (explained in greater detail in the sections that follow):
It takes a lot of effort to design service standards, train employees to achieve them, make them part of your standard operating procedure, then measure and evaluate performance against those standards. So, you want to be sure that all that time, effort, and trouble is worthwhile.
Ask the following questions:
Here are four factors to consider when choosing tasks to standardize:
At Your Service
In your business, there may be many service interactions that you take for granted because they’re so routine. Try to see your business through a totally fresh pair of eyes. With the help of some coworkers list every point of contact your business has with a customer. Every interaction is an opportunity to impress a customer positively or negatively. The list you create can form the foundation for your service standards.
Now take the information from step one and do the following:
Tales from the Real World
When Marriott, which had a good reputation for service, wanted to serve its hotel customers even better, it asked them what was really important to them. Based on the customer feedback, Marriott set new standards. Example: Faster check-ins. Check-in time went from an average of just under three minutes to half that, with 98 percent under two minutes.
To achieve that standard, Marriott overhauled its job classification and training systems. The goal: less specialization of people in the lobby for more help at peak times. They developed more well-rounded players through cross-training.
When the dust settled, the hotelier needed far fewer people in the lobby, cut overhead costs 40 percent, and improved both employee and customer satisfaction.
Answer the following questions:
Then write the standard using the format we showed you in the section “Fill In the Blanks.”
Next you need to do the following:
Standards mean nothing if the people responsible for delivering them aren’t capable of doing so. Do the following:
At Your Service
Educating employees is not free; just ask those of us who provide such services! At the same time, understand that employee development is not merely a cost center. To the contrary! A better way to think of employee education would be to consider it an investment that pays dividends in greater customer satisfaction, greater sales, and greater profits. The more skilled your employees, the better they can serve your customers and build the kind of loyalty (and resulting profit) that flows from positive customer experiences born of great service.
Standards that aren’t measured are nothing more than a wish list. Before you release the standards, let people know that you intend to monitor performance against the standard. Also, determine the method for monitoring. It’s not practical to measure everyone’s performance to standards every day. You’ll need a system for spot checking. Before you publish the standard, be clear about who is going to assess progress. The managers responsible for meeting the standards? A staff person? Outside consultants? How often will you take measurements?
Because the standards are important to your business performance, let employees know how they measure up. To not tell them is like asking people to play in a ball game where the score is a secret. People lose interest in meeting standards when they don’t know how well they’re performing.
In addition to publishing performance-to-standard statistics, show the link to important business indicators such as customers retained, new customers acquired, overall sales, profits, stock price, customer satisfaction scores—whatever helps your frontline understand that their contribution makes a big difference.
Employees must clearly understand the positive impact they will have on the company’s success by implementing the standards. And the negative impact they will have by not implementing the standards. No one wants to feel responsible for being the reason behind a failure.
Recognize performance achievement: throw compliments with abandon, throw a party, or even throw money at people. Make some noise, have some fun. Thank people for what they’ve done. Encourage them to keep at it. More motivation ideas appear in Chapter 20.
Don’t ever think you’ve finally fine-tuned the business. Just when you get it the way you thought it should be running, your customers will want something else. People’s needs change, their tastes change. Stay in touch with your customers and the market. Never be satisfied. Never stop trying to please.
Let’s briefly go back to your airplane ride. There you are, back in your seat. As you relax— all snug in your warm blanket, head propped up on the nice clean pillow—you close your eyes (but not too long, you can’t read with your eyes closed), and replay all those service interactions detailed earlier.
Watch It!
Service standards work when they are paired with training, support, measurement, and reinforcement through rewards. Don’t cheat your organization by just devising and publishing standards. That’s going less than halfway. You won’t achieve your standards. You’ll have wasted your time and made your workforce cynical.
Evaluate the quality of the experience by thinking about the following questions:
Watch It!
The most common greeting we all hear in entering a place of business is: Can I Help You! Never, ever, ever, say this line. When Ron hears this, he responds, “I don’t know, can you?” If you don’t know whether or not you can help someone, how should the customer know? Of course you should be able to help the customer. That’s what you are being paid for. Instead, you should be asking “How may I help you?” There really is a difference.
So much of the impression that customers form about your service comes from how they feel about your individual employees. So, naturally, you want your employees to come across as friendly, likeable, helpful, and knowledgeable. How can you specify a standard for that?
You can standardize behaviors.
While it’s not possible to measure “niceness,” you can specify the behaviors that add-up to being nice. For example:
Watch It!
While everyone appreciates the personal attention that comes from calling people by name, some prefer you call them Mr. or Ms. So&so rather than by their first name. Calling people by their first name is considered too casual or overly familiar. Better to start more formally. If your customer would rather be addressed as Ms. Rodriguez, don’t risk offending her by calling her Maria.
Here are four important reasons why setting standards improves your company: