Re-thinking Service Quality

Quality Control gone mad

I was told an interesting story today by a highly successful local business woman.  She is arranging for her elderly father to move down to Queenstown to be closer to her.  She has been looking for a house for him to rent but been put off by the rigidity of the application process.  Her father has spent a lifetime as a highly respected professional within NZ and finds the thought of having to ask his old colleagues for a reference quite demeaning and embarrassing.  The businesswoman has offered herself as a guarantor but without references the rental agency simply does not want to know.

This kind of rigid process does not provide any leeway for customer-facing employees to use their own judgement in deciding whether an exception could be allowed. In my experience this is a symptom of one of two things, either:

1. The person who owns or manages the business is a control freak who is not willing to trust the judgement of his employees or
2. Employees have been instructed to follow exactly the same process for all customers to ensure ‘quality of service’ is maintained.

The Control Freak

Unfortunately this term does apply to a lot of small business owners.  They have so much of their personal time and energy invested in their business that they often have trouble coming to grips with delegation of authority.  This is a leadership issue that can benefit hugely from coaching both on an individual basis and as a group with those to whom authority could be delegated.  There are wide range of Change Management techniques available to help leaders understand both how to delegate effectively and how to fully exploit the extra organisational capability that results.  If you think this is you please give me a call to discuss how I can help.

Quality Processes

The second cause can be much more insidious.  After all, if you want to get a quality kite mark in any industry sector you need to show both that you have processes and that you apply them at all times.  So quality has become confused with consistency – by adhering to the same process for all you are ensuring that every customer receives exactly the same level of service.

It’s hardly surprising that this misconception about ‘quality’ has developed.  The theoretical and practical understanding of quality in business has, for a long time, been lead by large scale manufacturers. Their main concern has been to make their goods faster without increasing the number of defective items that they produce.  Deciding what to manufacture in the first place has only relatively recently become a part of the quality cycle as pressure for greater efficiency has spread beyond the production line.

(Interestingly, these same global giants have used their in-house quality cycle (eg LEAN, Six Sigma etc.) to allow employees to take ownership of business challenges and thereby create a much more consultative environment and a more motivated workforce.)

Service Quality in a Small Market

To make matters worse, service quality for many large corporates can and does operate effectively in the same way.  These global giants essentially exclude customers who stray too far from the median in their requirements and allow small niche companies to thrive around their borders.

Few companies within New Zealand are large enough to be able to maintain this attitude for very long.  For a business servicing a small town or rural region, ignoring the needs of their non-average customers is a very risky attitude.  While demand for the service they provide is high they may seem to succeed but they are leaving themselves vulnerable to their competitors.  If a rival offers more flexibility of service or demand goes down they may find that the sheer numbers of customers willing to stick with their rigid process is not enough to keep them afloat.

If you’d like to find out more about improving service quality for all your customers contact me, Sarah Bogle, on 03 442 3645 or use my contact form.

Frameworks for Change Management

click for full course outline

Managing change is a critical skill in today’s world of rapid and continuous change. Businesses often recognise the challenge of getting people to change shortly after implementation has started. The new system, process or structure is expected to go in unopposed. When the welcome mat doesn’t appear the project team scrambles to do some patch up communication – often with poor results. This training course provides both the critical skills and a framework for the successful management of change.

Course objectives

This course will allow participants to:

• Understand the impact of change
• Prepare for and support impending changes
• Manage others through changes in the workplace
• Get buy-in; deal with resistance and avoid the ‘tyranny of positivity’
• Become a leader of change
• Confidently develop creative change solutions
• Ensure that change is sustainable

Control & Change

There’s an interesting blog on HBR today called What to Do When You’re Out of Control by Peter Bregman.  It’s written as an example of how we can help ourselves feel better and deal with others more effectively in uncertain situations. To me it strikes right at the heart of Change Management.

As Change Managers, Agents and Leaders we create and oversee situations where people are much more likely to feel that they are completely out of control. As Peter’s article clearly illustrates, this lack of control puts people into a heightened state of anxiety where the smallest trigger can result abnormal behaviour.  By this I mean behaviour that we wouldn’t normally expect to see within our workplace or even within our everyday life. I’ve seen people scream and shout, burst into tears and even deliberately crash their car, not just  because they feel that their world is being turned upside down and inside out BUT ALSO because they feel that nothing they can do will make any difference.

The emotional cycle of change - Kübler-Ross 1969

That’s why a key element of the role of a Change Manager has to be to explore and develop ways for each individual effected by the change to exert some control over their own lives.  And I do use that breadth of language deliberately. Events that we have control over act as a chunk of bedrock to stand on or a life saver to grab hold of during the turbulence of change but while that turbulence is within the workplace, the solution does not have to be.

One of the problems with extending individuals’ control within the workplace is that, like taking a peek at Schrödinger’s cat, allowing individuals to influence the change taking place affects the probable success of the transformation.  How do you maintain the clarity of vision required and ensure that the change programme speaks with a single voice while you are encouraging everyone to shout at the same time? It’s a fundamental of Change Management that everyone has to share the same understanding of what’s happening and how they’re going to get there.

So how do you give people control of what goes on outside the workplace?  Of course you can’t tell people what to do on their own time.  What you can give them is training and development designed to increase their emotional intelligence and help them to feel more confident about exerting control wherever the opportunity arises, in or out of the workplace.  Simply talking people through the emotional cycle of change and helping them to understand where on the line they are and the stages they still have to go through can also have a profound effect – understanding something is the first step towards feeling ‘in control’.

If you’re responsible for managing change in your business you may be interested in my 2 day Frameworks for Change Management course.