Excellence Service Tips Part 6

1. You basically have 2 choices when it comes to growth: do more of what you are already doing, or do different things. In our framework, doing more of what you are already doing means growing the existing service model. Doing different things means building new service models.
2. If you want to grow your existing service model, you must first take control of it. This typically means that you have to increase your standardisation. Most organisations, it turns out, have to give up some degree of responsiveness to the needs of some customers if they want to scale the business. This does not have to mean, however, that you must sacrifice overall quality. You can use various strategies to defy the expected trade-off between standardised operations and the level of service a customer experiences.
3. An alternative growth model is the multi-focused firm, which means that multiple service models within the same organisation are each individually optimised for a distinct operating segment, each strategically good or bad at certain things. These models often show up as distinct brands or at least distinct business units. From a structural standpoint, the multi-focused firm is a shared-service platform where multiple service models share at least some of the same back-office services.
4. Multi-focused firms succeed when their individual service models create some kind of mutual benefit for each other, either economies of scale or economies of experience. Organisations that achieve economies of experience are good at sharing and leveraging knowledge across service models.
5. There are 2 primary barriers to making the multi-focused firm work. The first is a lack of political will to draw the line in the right place, that is , to optimally determine which service will be shared and which will stay within control of the individual service models. The second barrier is the willingness to tolerate uncompetitive quality or pricing in the company's shared services.