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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:
- The person who owns or manages the business is a control freak who is not willing to trust the judgement of his employees or
- 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.
Scrum for Small Businesses
No, I’m not suggesting that a game of rugby is the way to mange your small business. Scrum is a technique more commonly used as part of Agile software development by businesses like Google and Nokia. High Tech companies are hotbeds of innovative ways of doing things. Developing a new phone is high risk and manpower intensive and the competition may launch something better while you’re halfway through building it. This kind of environment demands that an organisation be focused , flexible and responsive and Scrum is one of the ways that they achieve this.
Scrum evolved in the ’90s* and got its name largely because of the most visible aspect of the process – a daily team ’scrum’. The daily scrum lasts for no more than 15 minutes and each team member has to state what they achieved yesterday, what they plan to achieve today and if they anticipate anything preventing them from achieving this. Take a moment to imagine this within your own business, how long does it usually take for you to find out what everyone is doing and whether they’ve got outstanding jobs from last month because of a problem they can’t solve by themselves? And this is just the beginning…
The complete Scrum system
Scrum also shares many points of similarity with systems like LEAN and Six Sigma – team members pull tasks from the list and thereby take ownership of them; management focus is on removing barriers; the whole team has visibility of progress towards the overall goal.
Scrum’s main flaw is the overhead in organisation required once the task gets too big for one team (more than about 8 people). But this makes it ideal for most small sales and service businesses and for small but urgent projects. I’ve implemented Scrum processes within the context of large technology projects in the past and believe that they could deliver great results within the small business context. If any readers are looking for innovative ways to increase the responsiveness and flexibility of their business – to meet customer needs faster and better – call me on 027 4776 881 and I will come and tell you more about Scrum.
* Scrum references are:
Re-engineering
If optimisation is all about ensuring that WHAT you do delivers your business’ requirements then re-engineering is all about ensuring that HOW you do those things is as efficient and cost-effective as possible.
The term re-engineering tends to bring to mind large scale manufacturing processes and in fact this is where many of the well known methodologies such as LEAN (Toyota) and Six Sigma (Motorola) are developed. I have been involved in managing and delivering re-engineering projects since 1993 (back then it was called Total Quality Management if anyone remembers that one!) and my experience has been mainly within
- technology intensive service environments such as call centres,
- online processing such as web application forms and
- intra business processes such as HRM and ICT delivery and support.
Sustainable Business
Ensuring your business is sustainable is much more than being careful about the resources you use. You need to consider if all your processes and systems will work in the real world, with real-world competition, real-world resource constraints and of course real people inventing, manufacturing, delivering and buying your products and services.
Forming - Business and Technology Consulting, Queenstown, New Zealand
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