Four Rules for Engineering a Service Revolution
Improving service quality in a large organization can be difficult – and it can take a long time. But we have experimented with many approaches for the past 20 years, and we have discovered a small number of key principles that dramatically improve your chances of success in building a strong service culture – and improving service quality – fast!
These four principles are counter-intuitive. They go against the prevailing common sense about how to improve your service. We call these “Four Rules for Engineering a Service Revolution”.
Rule #1: Don’t start with customer-facing employees. Instead, involve everyone, with a special focus on internal service providers.
Rule #2: Don’t start by training people on specific service skills, scripts and procedures. Instead, educate them first to a better understanding of what service excellence really means.
Rule #3: Don’t pilot the change. Instead, go big and go fast to build momentum for the new culture.
Rule #4: Don’t focus on traditional KPIs during the service revolution such as satisfaction, complaints, process measures, and sales. Instead, focus on leading “revolution indicators” to generate value-adding ideas and new service actions.
In virtually every case, when leaders and service teams have applied these Rules, their organizations have enjoyed dramatic, measurable, and sustained improvements in service culture – and in the quality of the internal and external service they deliver.
