Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (11 page)

? Unnecessary transport

? Excess inventory

? Excess and non-ergonomic motion

? Waiting

? Overproduction/ production ahead of demand

? Inappropriate processing

? Defects

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Why Benchmark Manufacturing Companies?

To optimize efficiency, reliability, and delivery, we recommend you benchmark the wizards of manufacturing. Their successes come from the best kind of hard, scientific data, so learning from them can really tighten up your service ship. Concepts like
error-tolerant design
(for example, a door that won’t let you lock yourself out accidentally),
behavior-shaping constraints
(e.g., a trans-mission that needs to be in ‘‘Park’’ before the key can be removed), and many other well-established concepts in manufacturing can bring advantages to your customers and your company, when applied appropriately in a service context.

To understand the value of applying manufacturing knowl-

edge in a service context: Suppose you’re planning a tapas bar in an exurb of Phoenix. You got the idea from your friend Joe, who developed the wildly successful
TapasTree
restaurant in Tucson.

Joe got into the restaurant business to support his art collecting habits. Joe’s been a kind of genius at creating an appealing, laid-back, artsy vibe in TapasTree’s dining room. His approach is to think of dining out as an aesthetic experience, much like visiting an art museum or going to a gallery opening. Joe has taken that idea to its logical limits, by making his restaurant a ‘‘living gallery.’’

Each seating enclave is in fact a unique sculptural ensemble, one that makes diners feel like they’ve been transported into a world where form and style transcend workaday concerns. And, wonderfully, the enclaves can be reconfigured in a matter of hours by a couple of waiters; the dining room’s layout changes in marvelous ways from month to month.

This unique aesthetic really pulled people in. It gave Joe a huge head start in a low-margin business. Since his initial success, Joe has implemented a dozen other food-as-art insights in his restaurant, each of them capitalizing on his background as an art historian and connoisseur. After a year of rave reviews and paying off his initial debts, he’s beginning to plan new locations.

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

In such a situation we’d certainly encourage you to explore whether aspects of Joe’s success can be adapted if you’re starting your own business—especially since Joe seems eager to be a model for you. But don’t let him overreach his expertise. For example, we’d bet long odds that Joe hasn’t mapped out an optimal kitchen workflow. And he has almost certainly missed some key inefficiencies that plague his supplier processes, among many others.

Of course, he doesn’t realize he’s wasteful in these areas; he figures his systems are optimized, battle-tested, the only way to go. (They are, after all, the only way he knows.) The bottom line?

There’s a lot to be learned studying the workflow ideas of the folks at Toyota, Cisco, or FedEx. Those are the go-to guys for streamlining and standardizing your behind-the-scenes operations—you might call them the professors of efficient and consistent outcomes. Joe’s advice in these areas, on the other hand, may need to be taken with a big grain of
sal de mesa
.

Why Efficient Processes Can Transform Service

We understand why service-focused teams tend to be skeptical about the relevance of systems like Lean Manufacturing. After all, to stand out and inspire confidence, we strive to anticipate—to meet customers’

needs
ahead
of time—because ‘‘just in time’’ can mean too darn late.

We insist on keeping ‘‘excess’’ inventory, because it means we can maintain our high service standards (‘‘
Absolutely, we’ve got that
’’) even when unexpected demand occurs. We even encourage our employees to make ‘‘repetitive’’ motions on behalf of customers (‘‘
Let me call the
vendor again for you in an hour
’’) precisely because willingness to be inefficient on their behalf is read by our customers as
caring
. More generally, we often need our employees to be ‘‘inefficient’’ in their caring for customers, because it enhances the customer’s valuation of us.

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Borrowing from Xerox

Years ago, we adopted a continuous improvement/problem-solving method that Xerox taught us when we were benchmarking them.

The Xerox method is useful, especially in a team setting, when searching for solutions to wasteful situations and other business problems. It has just six parts. (Repeat if necessary until no longer needed.)

Step 1: Identify and select the problem to be worked on

Step 2: Analyze the problem

Step 3: Generate potential solutions

Step 4: Select and plan the best solution

Step 5: Implement the solution

Step 6: Evaluate the solution

For these reasons, our kind of enterprise seems more easily reconciled with a second principle of Lean Manufacturing:
Value is determined
by your customers.
If it takes a thousand ‘‘inefficient’’ experiences to create loyal customers with confidence in us, so be it. Yes, it’s slow, hard work to provide the kind of lavish, painstaking attention that produces unqualified positive reactions. But when our customers’ satisfaction and loyalty are high, they value us highly. And when we’re highly valued, we earn more. Hard measurements such as defect reduction metrics are important in service as well as in manufacturing, but there is something more here as well: In service-focused businesses, our customers don’t tend to quantify the source of their happiness with precision. Instead, they come away from our efforts to serve them with a generalized glow, a vague feeling that they like us and want to return, and (we hope) a desire to tell their friends about us. That’s the only sort of ‘‘value assessment’’ our loyal customers tend to assign to our superb service.

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

So can the ‘‘efficiency increases value’’ concept really help us serve our customers better? It can, we believe—so long as you restrict its territory a bit. We
do
want to be highly efficient—especially
behind the
scenes.
For example, to return to our hypothetical friend TapasTree Joe, the continuous motion of the Lean Manufacturing approach could well bring him dramatic improvement over traditional batch-and-queue prep, with its wasteful down times interspersed with chaotic scenes of yelling chefs and frantic ‘‘expediting.’’ Improving behind-the-scenes efficiency also serves our customers well by reducing errors, improving delivery time, and keeping staff fresh and alert.
3

Similarly, in online commerce, behind-the-scenes streamlining of customer choices through analysis of customer patterns increases value for company and customer alike, as long as it is not intrusive. And if online customers want to proverbially ‘‘help out in the back’’ by doing their own account management, this can increase your efficiency and help you provide faster service at a lower price. We recommend such self-service be voluntary in most business contexts, or that you at least include systems that monitor customer frustration levels and provide them with many escape hatches—like effective, well-staffed online support chat and a toll-free hotline, just in case they get stuck.

Stamping Out Waste? Don’t Crush Value by Accident

We wish all of our clients had a giant red ‘‘pause’’ button they could push whenever they get the urge to purge customer service processes, procedures, and traditions accumulated over years of service. Our concern is born of experience: Service-focused companies tend to delete crucial value from their service offerings, all in the name of efficiency.

When they realize what they’ve lost, it’s too late. Starting to think that your follow-up thank-you cards aren’t valuable to customers? Or that your original ink signature on letters to incoming customers is a waste of your time? Or that your customers won’t notice if you drop a website feature they rarely use? You may be right. But don’t do anything Building Anticipation Into Your Products and Services

71

yet. Because the odds are pretty good that you’re underestimating the value of the old approach to your customers. Here’s why.

First, people form
emotional attachments
to many aspects of their lives—including attachments to your employees, your procedures, and your service features. Emotional attachments are by their nature not rational. If you repeatedly experience delight in a particular context (at work, in a relationship, in your summers on the Cape), you’ll tend to form an emotional attachment to many aspects of that context. A child happily raised in and accustomed to a room with yellowing walls—surfaces which were originally white—may not react to a gleaming white repainting of it with the gratitude her parents expected.

In the same way, aspects of your service that seem expendable to you, and thus ‘‘wasteful’’ to retain, may have come to have emotional value for some of your customers. To make matters worse, even interviews with your most articulate customers may fail to register accurately the depth of their attachment to, say, being greeted by the smell of fresh coffee in your reception area in the mornings—because the strength of long-term emotional attachments tends to be underestimated, until it’s too late. Ever been surprised how much you missed a sweetheart after being sure it was time to break up? Then you know what we’re talking about.

A more general problem is that people usually aren’t paying close attention to their positive experiences, and therefore don’t know what
specific
aspects of their experience felt especially good to them. When you ask people to think back on an experience, they try to come up with ‘‘a theory of why I liked/disliked it’’
—
which is what you asked them to do, after all. But one of the best-tested findings in social psychology is that
while people do have accurate access to their feelings, their
theories about why they feel the way they do can be wildly inaccurate.
People are especially poor at detecting the origins of their
positive
feelings. The bottom line? Even very intelligent and well-intentioned customers can lead you astray if asked to, say, ‘‘List the five things that make you feel the best during your encounters with us.’’ So don’t be too quick to delete things that didn’t make their top lists.

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

Try this exercise sometime: Ask a friend to think back on a great dining experience she had, even as recently as a couple months ago.

Then cross-examine her:

Do you remember the dećor of the place?

Not precisely.

Do you remember the face of the waiter?

No, I can’t.

Do you remember the face of the maitre d’?

Nope.

What did you have for an appetizer?

I can’t quite remember.

What did you have for an entreé?

I can’t quite remember.

What did you have to drink?

I can’t quite remember.

Was there anything special about the valet parking?

I can’t remember.

Then what was so great about it?

I don’t know exactly, but it was a great experience.

Using Lean Manufacturing’s methodology (that only what is valued by the customer has value), everything above, taken
individually
, could easily be thrown into the classification of
muda
(waste): the excellence of the valet parker (for all the description you got, your friend might have taken the bus), the faceless maitre d’ (she could have seated herself ); the faceless server (a buffet would have been very practical); even the excellent quality of the food, wine, and dećor, none of which she remembered in much detail. Yet all of these touch points, and so many more, ultimately built an experience that was more than the sum of its parts: The
collective
is what does it. That’s why the attention to details is so important in the service business: making sure that each one of those touch points is well executed.

By the way, we could make an educated guess as to the details that Building Anticipation Into Your Products and Services

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added up, bit by bit, to your friend’s appraisal of having had a ‘‘fabu-lous’’ night out. Let’s analyze just the last touch point in question (which, as a hello/good-bye [see Chapter 11] is one of the most likely to have left an impression): We like to think the valet parker greeted her, smiled at her, and was prompt. He didn’t walk to retrieve her car, he ran. This action signaled subliminally that he cared—that he was committed to giving her prompt service. He took time to wipe her windshield. He did not change her radio station. He did not move her seat in a way that required her to readjust it, or if he did need to adjust her seat, he at least showed concern about the inconvenience:
‘‘Ma’am,
I had to move your seat.’’

Service Alfresco

To create a fresco requires a palette of colors, skill, time, and attention—and the judgment and foresight to envision a painting that will fit just right on a particular wall. To create exceptional service, treat every single time you come in contact with your customers as an opportunity to add another brush stroke to their service fresco.

A great service provider is always looking for an opportunity to pull out the palette and add a few more touches that will make a more vivid, inspiring impression. In the face of the struggle to reduce waste, a great service provider knows these extra touches, as long as they actually reach the customer, are never wasted.

They’re what keep a business the picture of good health.

Process-Based Anticipation on the Internet

When you interact with customers via the Internet, you have an opportunity to provide anticipatory service created or enhanced by software algorithms—algorithms that offer individualized guidance and assistance to your customers. The best of these anticipatory algorithms can help a 74