Excellence Serivce Tips Part 4

1. Service customers don't just purchase a service; they also participate in creating it. Among other things, they make the service faster or slower, better or worse, cheaper or more expensive to deliver - for themselves and for other customers. They are active producers of the value they end up consuming.
2. Customers can be more or less involved operationally, depending on your industry and your specific design choices - for example, how much self-service you build into your model and whether you involve your customers in your improvement efforts.
3. The more dependent your service business is on the behaviour of customer-operators, the more important it is to manage them successfully. Similar to employee management, the four components of a successful customer management system are customer selection, training, job design and performance management.
4. Not all customer-operators are alike. When compared with each other, they are faster slower, smarter, pickier, later, earlier, or more or less prepared to perform their operational roles. This diversity increases the cost and complexity of running a service business.
5. Assume that you don't know exactly how your customer re affecting your operations or how well your efforts to manage them are really going. Reframe any certainties as hypotheses that need confirmation. Test them. Fortunately, the data you need is usually right at your fingertips.