How To Improve The Service Quality Of Your Organization
Article shared by : Improving service quality is certainly not a simple, straightforward exercise. It will have implications for the whole culture of the organization.
Some ideas put forward are worthy of consideration:
Identifying primary quality determinants:
Knowing what determines quality is, of course, crucial. However, consumers and producers of services do not necessarily perceive service quality on common dimensions and even when they do hold common dimensions, they evaluate them differently.
Managing customer expectations:
To attract custom, organizations are often tempted to raise customer expectations. Companies make promises to consumers on aspects of their business that they think the customer will value in order to give the organization a competitive advantage. However care must be exercised in making promises to customers.
For example, consider the following sample taken from the Yellow Pages Directory:
a. ‘Nobody does it better’
b. ‘The very best of care’
c. ‘Immediate delivery from stock’
d. ‘On time-every time’
e. ‘You can’t beat our service’
They are both difficult to measure and raise consumer expectations unrealistically. As a rule it is better to exceed customer expectations than to let the customer down.
Managing evidence:
The ‘evidence’ from the viewpoint of a service organization includes many things and consumers look to these as an indicator of what the service might be like (pre-service expectation) and what, in fact, the service was like after using it (post-service evaluation).
Physical and human evidence play a significant part in image formation. Retailers are interested in several aspects relating to architecture and design for promoting an image. Similarly, atmosphere influences image. The term ‘atmospherics’ has been coined to define the conscious design of space to influence buyers. The atmosphere influences the buyers’ expectations and perceptions of the service. For example lawyers’ offices and banks are designed to communicate confidence.
Various factors such as colours, music, furnishing, space etc. can evoke a variety of feelings about the service organization, e.g. friendliness, austerity, sobriety, authority, rationality, stability, flexibility. The physical aspects of a service will allow us to make sense of it and we expect the physical signs to be in tune with the nature of the service. Incongruity can make us uncertain and uncomfortable.
Educating consumers about the service:
Helping the customer to understand the service would appear to be a sine qua non for dispensing a quality service. However, for many services, e.g. garage repair business, professional services, the challenge can be a daunting one and one that perhaps they are not willing to confront. Equally, the willingness of the customer ‘to be educated’ requires evaluation along with their capacity to assimilate the nature of the service being delivered.
Developing a quality culture:
Quality is not delivered in a vacuum but through an organization with all its imperfections. Commitment to quality must pervade the whole organization. A number of institutional factors can either help or hinder the provision of quality service.
They are:
1. Human – job descriptions, selection, training, rewards, career path.
2. Organization/structure – integration/coordination of functions arid reporting structure
3. Measurement – complaint and customer satisfaction tracking and performance evaluation.
4. Systems support – technical, computers, and databases.
5. Services – value added, range and quality, standards or performance, satisfying needs and expectations.
6. Programmes – complaint management, sales/promotional tools, management tools.
7. Communication (internal) – policies and procedures, feedback within the organization.
8. Communication (external) – consumer education, creation of expectations, image.
Automating quality:
The variability in quality service emanating from human inadequacy can be avoided through automation. Before such a decision is made, research needs to establish which parts of the service require the human touch and which require automation. The danger is that automation takes over for reasons other than automation.
Following up the service:
Organizations need to continuously monitor their performance by contacting customers to determine their view of the service delivered.
More recently, organizations have been asked to consider five imperatives for improving service quality:
1. Define a clear service role and standard for service employees and communicate and reinforce these standards.
2. Compete for talent – allocate people to jobs according to ability and aptitude and give them more flexibility and control to do the job. The problem with this is that many service jobs are by nature narrow in scope and perceived as ‘dead end’.
3. Emphasize service teams – getting people to work as a team is an attractive proposition and potentially very effective for delivering quality. However, entrenched attitudes (negative) to work and strong personalities can quite easily prevent the development of a team spirit. The action (or inaction) of management is crucial here. Good employees need to see management doing something about the members of the team who are simply not pulling their weight.
4. Go for reliability – at the heart of excellent service is reliability and it is argued that nothing less than 100 percent reliability is acceptable.
5. Be great at problem resolution – service organizations cannot avoid things going wrong for a customer but it is their reaction to this that is critical. Their response can make things better or very much worse. Customers need to feel that actions are being taken to try to resolve the problem. For large service organizations client dissatisfaction of attempts at problem resolution is a real issue.
Quality leadership curve (Figure 15.4) model enables you to set your expectations on the journey to quality, to act strategically, and to watch for problems and opportunities on the way. There are a series of leadership steps, or more correctly transitions, towards the quality goal. Each phase has its own special characteristics and there is likely to be some degree of ‘turbulence’ before breaking through from one phase to the next.
Quality leadership could be any company’s strategic intent, when success is measured against customer expectations, within defined target markets. Just what this might entail will always be vague at the outset. Commitment to a precise goal at an early stage could lead to an incorrect choice. ‘Quality leadership’ is a qualitative target.
Having said that, there are steps to take, and these will involve transitions in the way things are normally done. This is a process of ‘learning by doing’. These steps can be logically planned to advantage, individual projects set up and completed, and motivational and organizational structures put in place. All this can be achieved in terms of commitment to a superordinate quality leadership goal.