Employee’s Roles in Service Delivery
Employees are key drivers of sustained business success in companies as diverse as Charles Schwab, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, USAA Insurance and Chick-fil-A. Consider the case of Singapore Airlines, a restless toddler repeatedly dropped him pacifier. Every time the child would cry, and someone would retrieve the pacifier. Finally, one of the attendants picked up the pacifier and attached it to a ribbon and sewed it to the child’s shirt. The child and the mother were happy and passengers seated nearby gave the attendant a standing ovation.
The front-line service is enormously important in any business. They are responsible for understanding customer needs and for interpreting customer requirements in real time. By focusing on the critical role of service employees and by developing strategies that lead to effective customer-oriented service, organizations can begin to close the service performance gap.
Table Of Content
- Service Culture
- The Service Triangle
- Boundary-spanning roles
- Strategies for delivering service quality through people
- Customer-Oriented Service Delivery
- Summary
1. Service Culture
A culture of service is an organizational culture that prioritizes customer service in all goals, decisions, actions, and everyday operations. When an organization has a heart for service, each employee is connected emotionally to a world-class service outcome.
Better yet, a service culture is thriving when it becomes the foundation of everything that happens in your organization; when decisions, behaviors, strategies, meetings, interactions, signage, forms, messages, etc. are all designed and executed to support and sustain service delivery-to both internal and external customers.
Exhibiting Service Leadership
A strong service culture being with leaders in the organization who demonstrate a passion for service excellence. Leadership does not consist of bestowing a set of commands from a thick rule book but, rather the regular and consistent demonstration of one’s value.
Developing a service culture
A service culture cannot be developed overnight, and there is no easy way to sustain a service culture. The human resource and internal marketing practices can develop a service culture over time.
Transporting a service culture
Transporting a service culture through international business expansions is also very challenging. Attempting to “export” a corporate culture to another country creates additional issues. Although tremendous opportunities exist in the global marketplace, the many legal, cultural, and language barrier become particular evident for services that depend on human interaction.
2. The Service Triangle
The service marketing triangle or the Service triangle as it is commonly called, underlines the relationships between the various providers of services, and the customers who consume these services.
Relationships are most important in the services sector. The service triangle outlines all the relationships that exist between the company, the employees and the customers. Furthermore, it also outlines the importance of systems in a services industry and how these systems help achieve customer satisfaction.
As the name suggests, the service marketing triangle can also be used to market the service to consumers. The marketing completely depends on the interaction going on between the customer and the service provider. We will look at each of these interactions in detail, and also read on how to market to your customer based on the interaction.
3. Boundary-spanning roles
If you have a small business and don’t have as many technological resources as a large company, utilizing boundary spanning roles can allow your small business to flourish. As an extra bonus, it can also help large companies become even more competitive.
Boundary spanning roles interact with individuals and groups outside the organization to obtain valuable information to help the innovation process. Boundary spanning roles allow a company to gain more innovation information from other businesses. It’s useful to gain insight from other organizations that you may not be aware of. Not just management is involved in boundary spanning; all employees can get information from one or more companies and bring information back to their business to help improve innovation.
4. Strategies for delivering service quality through people
A complex combination if strategies is needed to ensure that service employee are willing and able to deliver quality services and that they stay motivated to perform in customer-oriented, service-minded ways. Within each of these basic strategies are a number of specific sub-strategies for accomplishing the goal
- Hire the right people: Hiring the right people is crucial for the success of your business and that’s why entrepreneurs should have a formal hiring process in place when looking for new staff. By putting time and work into finding the right people, you will improve your chances of hiring the best performers and avoiding costly and painful mistakes.
- Develop people to deliver service quality: To provide quality service, employees need ongoing training in the necessary technical skills and knowledge and in process or interactive skills. Examples of technical skills and knowledge are working with accounting systems in hotels, cash machine procedures in a retail store, underwriting procedures in an insurance company, and any operational rules the company has for running its business. Most service organizations are quite conscious of and relatively effective at training employees in technical skills.
- Provide needed support system: To be efficient and effective in their jobs, service workers require internal support system that are aligned with their need to be customer focused
- Retain the best people: Employee retention matters. Failing to retain a key employee is costly to the bottom line and creates organizational issues such as insecure coworkers, excess job duties that coworkers must absorb, time invested in recruiting, hiring, and training a new employee. Various estimates suggest that losing a middle manager costs an organization up to 100 percent of their salary. The loss of a senior executive is even more costly. This is not only because of the lost revenues but also due to the fact that hiring and training a replacement is costly to your organization.
5. Customer-Oriented Service Delivery
A customer orientation approach means that the company gives a lot of importance to the customer and is a customer oriented company. Such companies make all their marketing strategies with customers at the apex of the pyramid.
The key to having customer orientation is to add as much value as possible to your products. The customers love the company which provides them value. Hence, overall, customer orientation involves four steps of value addition so that the customers are satisfied and happy with the company.
6. Summary
Because many service are delivered by people in real time, closing the service performance gap is heavily dependent on human resource strategies. The successful execution of such strategies begins with the development and nurturing of a true service culture throughout the organization.
