Carquest Standards of Service Excellence

The Hazards of Subcontracting Your Hellos and Good Byes

Be cautious about subcontracting your greetings and your farewells. Of course, subcontracting is often a necessary part of business: properly handled, it can be appropriate and desirable. But such arrangements can also be Trojan Horses, filled with enemies of your cause who ransack the precious goodwill of your customers - sometimes even before the customers quite make it at your doorstep.

We are being melodramatic in our language about this to make sure you mark our words with special care: The quality of the subcontractor's entire staff, their selection process, their training standards, their appearance and grooming, their code of conduct - everything - has to be absolutely integrated with your own. From the point of view of customers, if employee wears the company logo or answers their calls or opens the doors for them, that employee is your employee.

To make matters much worse, so many of these subcontracting - gone wrong happen at hellos and good byes. the rationales do not help:" Oh, he works for the security company"; "Oh, they are the parking subcontractors"; " I am sorry she barked at you on the phone- she is a temp."

In essence, such statements are a way of coaxing customers to accept the idea that "that is not us". To your customers, such statements are just infuriating baloney. "If I buy a product from you", explained one such customer, "and it's serviced by somebody else you hired, well, I am sorry; to me that is your service." And if that rough service happens at an entry or exit point, it is harming a critical, emotion-filled moment that has a strong hand in shaping your customer's perception of your brand.

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.

Excellence Service Tips Part 5

1. It's not enough to design your service model right. Uncommon service is achieved when great organisational design meets a culture of service excellence. A basic way to think about it is this: service excellence is a product of design and culture
2. The right culture is not an universal concept. Your right culture is a distinct asset that must be consistent with your organisation's service model
3. One way to understand culture is to break it down into its relevant components. Edgar Schein's culture framework, which loosely divides a culture into artefacts, behaviours, and shared basic assumptions. As he argues; to change behaviour, you have to change the way people think. To change the way people think, start with the underlying assumptions that drive that thinking.
4. Great service organisations tend to do 3 things well in their relationship with culture. They have a deep clarity about the organisational culture they must cultivate in order to compete and win. They are effective in signalling the norms and values that embody that culture. And they work hard to ensure cultural consistency, alignment between the desired culture and organisational strategy, structure, and operations. 

Take Control of Good Byes

Good byes are often rushed - or skipped altogether. After all, you are frequently so relieved to have gotten one job wrapped up successfully, and to be able to move on to the next one. So a transaction often ends with an invoice. What a wasted opportunity! If your customers are happy, the good byes is your last, and one of your most notable, chances to bond with them, to add an important final chapter to the service story.

Try to close each interaction with your customer in way that is memorable and sincere. Too many otherwise-fine service experiences come to a miserable close that consists solely of handing back a credit card or "OK" or "next". How much hard-earned good will is lost that way? A lot.

So, try to never close an interaction without providing a personalised farewell and an invitation to return. If handled properly, this farewell will be personal, resonant, and long lasting - but before you move to the closing, make sure you ask a final question, slowly and sincerely: " Is there anything else I can do for you?" If the answer is "No, thank you," then move to the closing, as follows:

• Personalise it: Use the customer's name, for starters. Offer your business card, if appropriate for your type of business. Beyond these obvious things, customise your language to fit this customer's history with you. For example: if this is the last day of a convention or holiday, add your sincere wishes for safe travel. If you are a retailer, express your hope for satisfaction with the item purchased.
• Make it resonant: If appropriate, give a parting gift. It can be a lollipop for customer's child, a vintage postcard, or a book. An ideal gift I something that is emotionally resonant with your brand as well as appropriate to the customer. Invite your customer to come back again as she leaves.
• Long lasting: Unless inappropriate for the type of purchase, send a follow-up note. Persona and handwritten is better than pre-printed - this is the best $1 investment you may ever make.

Your good bye at the end of successfully resolving a customer's trouble call should never morph into an attempt to make an additional sale. Trouble calls need to be about just one thing: solving the customer's problem. Customers feel especially vulnerable and dependent on you during these calls, because you are the only one who can help them. Since they feel one down, for you to sneak in a sales pitch at the last moment can come across as having their arms twisted or being bait-and-switched. Yes, they may buy whatever you are pitching at that moment, but they will often resent you for it later.

The customer May come in Contact with You Earlier Than You Expect

Remember that service begins as soon as the customer comes in contact with you - but only the customer gets to determine when that first moment is, and it may be much earlier than you think, or would wish. For example, suppose a customer parks his car in a retailer's parking lot, and the first things he sees are broken chain link fencing and cigarette buts strewn all about. In this instance, the first contact has occurred, unbeknownst to the retailer, who now must struggle to overcome this negative impression, It's unfair, but it's reality. This is why every carefully managed resort pays attention to the arrival sequence: the flowers, the signage, the friendly security guard at the gatehouse, the doorman. By the time you get to your room, you should feel gently transported to another world.

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.