Service Recovery vs. Service Excellence: Choosing the Best Strategy For Your Patients

Unpredictable situations and customer dissatisfaction beyond your control make it rather impossible to achieve full service excellence.  Catherine K. Lee, PRC's Vice President of Customer Support Services, wrote this article on service in hospitals with emphasis on the reality: making every customer completely satisfied is only possible in a perfect world, not fully achievable but strive for it.

Service excellence is more about the general approach.  Optimizing your corporate culture will achieve improvement of the general service rating and that is what service excellence means. This approach will increase the mean scores. But then again perfection lays in details.
Therefore it is advised your employees are familiar with service recovery. Service recovery is simply put, rectifying a bad situation. however as service recovery has a very specific focus those scores will hardly be affected.

A good combination is ,without a doubt, the best way to get another step closer to perfection.

Cédric Van Helleputte

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When Does Customer Service Excellence Become ‘Legendary?’

In my previous blogs I like to believe I’ve shown you the importance of service excellence. A good question would be; ‘what is service excellence exactly?’ So below you find an article that gives you a straight forward answer.

The entire article is an extreme example of what they call legendary service. The company called L.L. Bean is an clothing internet retailer, and a certain gentleman once bought warm silk underpants on which there was a life time guarantee. Twenty years later he moved to Japan and the underwear, which had become no more than a rag, was no longer necessary in the warmer climate around the equator. He posted the underpants and sent them all the way back to the state of Maine. Because L.L. Bean cares a lot about their customers, they’ve sent a new pair back and they even repaid the shipping costs.

We have to agree this is an example of legendary service. 

Cédric Van Helleputte

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Surviving With Customer Service Excellence

During the past crises the economy has been suffering and still is. Therefore cost reduction was and still is absolutely necessary, however you should be careful where you cut in your organization, warns Kevin Fernando.

 Mister Fernando, a renowned trainer and manager, notes that especially in times of recession demands for quality and good service are high, customers crave value for money. Meanwhile employee morale is low. This is when managers prove their qualities. In general  people from finance tend to propose cuts in services that could be acceptable. Nevertheless Mr. Fernando also believes that loyal customers and their satisfaction are the most valuable asset of a company (cfr. previous blog entry: ‘the six principles of service excellence’), so steps to reduce cost should focus on efficiency improvement without negative service impact.

In short Kevin Fernando believes that in these difficult times those who excel in quality and customer service will stand far above all others. 

Cédric Van Helleputte

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The Six Principles of Service Excellence

Theo Gilbert-Jamison, an expert in customer relationship, has got her fair share of experience in pursuing service excellence. As a former employee of the Ritz-Carlton, she has seen what it’s all about.

After more than twenty years of studying the Ritz and other leading companies in service excellence, she published a customer service business model called ‘the six principles of service excellence’.

She claims that if you follow this model, perfection is at the end of the road. Although this is not to be misunderstood: once you obtain a certain degree of excellence it continues to be a challenge to remain in the right course. These principles underline the importance of choosing achievable objectives, a sustainable corporate culture and the mind-set of individual employees as well as management reinforcement and organisational alignment.

These objectives must be very clearly stated and setting rewards will stimulate the staff in their pursuit of perfection. This and every other step is interwoven, you have to endeavour good results in every aspect.

The six  principles are more than a business model, she says; it’s a comprehensive strategy for any enterprise small or large that wishes to provide a good and long term service to the most important stakeholders: their customers.

Cédric Van Helleputte

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How can companies improve their customer service?

After we gave some examples about good and bad service excellence in different companies,  I would like to discuss some key elements which are necessary to achieve the best possible service.

First of all service excellence is  a never stopping process where companies try to excel in serving their clients. Moreover, the need for customer-focused services is driven by rising expectations and the varied needs of a diverse clientele. This brings me to the term benchmarking,  which is a process for organizations to evaluate their offered services by comparing them with other companies. I’m convinced that these evaluations bring up new ideas and approaches for customer service improvement. In addition, it points out that leadership and organizational skills are also decisive factors; good management is very important to get satisfied clients.

Well, from my point of view there are also a few other elements that could be important for customer service improvement such as staff engagement and communication. So, to conclude, customer service excellence includes many different skills. That is why an excellent service can be developed by a good combination  of these skills.

 http://www.best-in-class.com/bestp/domrep.nsf/products/benchmarks-for-excellence-in-hotel-management-a-best-practices-analysis-for-the-caribbean-market

http://www.performanceinpeople.co.uk/service-excellence/

Florian Tack

Why is service excellence that important?

It is perfectly clear that service excellence is a key factor in every business you can imagine. To put it simply:  It’s all about people. Word of mouth is the easiest way for a company to get a good reputation. 

Nevertheless, I’m convinced that everyone has experienced at least once a bad service. An appropriate example could be a restaurant visit. When a waitress isn’t friendly or glasses aren’t clean it’s obvious that this restaurant doesn’t treat their clients well. So, in other words, it is in the company’s own interest to pursue an excellent service towards their customers.

From my point of view staff engagement is the most important component to customer service improvement.  When Thomas Cook has decided to delay the flights from over 1000 people, they offered a personal treatment by contacting everybody personally. That is why this is a very good example of excellent service. As a result each client will understand this decision without making complaints, which is good for the company.

Florian Tack

Singapore Airlines, an excellent service

Another example of a company with excellent service is Singapore Airlines. They have already won over a hundred awards (you can see the impressive list here: achievements).

In September they were the winners of the Business Traveller Awards 2010. They came first in the categories Best Airline, Best Business Class, Best Economy Class, Best Cabin Staff, Best Asian Airline and they were the runner-up in Best First Class. Singapore Airlines gives a lot of attention, time and money to the education of their employees, and it is money well spent. Their great service has made Singapore Airlines one of the most lucrative airlines in the world.

Tickets at Singapore Airlines are not cheap, however, you are not paying for just transportation, but a service. Not just a service, but one of the best services there is.

In my opinion, in terms of price/quality rate, Singapore Airlines is one of the best airlines in the world.

Tim Van De Walle
(Building a Culture of Service Excellence)