Is service excellence as a culture really thriving?
Caution: this post is about the cultural dimensions of service excellence. While I have worked in service businesses extensively, I am staying out of offering views on that subject.
My view is that service excellence as a culture is deeply vitiated. I am left wondering if companies offering services want to listen to you, want to be reached, want to talk to you or only want to force you to rate them well and live in a state of hubris.
The era of technology and mobile app enabled service delivery, fueled by social media pressures and a somewhat flawed interpretation of the idea of Net promoter Scores, delivered by helpless frontline employees may be causing this.
Starting with the 1980s, there was a very strong service quality and service excellence movement emanating especially from the United States. We have all heard legendary concepts like Moments of Truth by Jan Carlzon (SAS) and books like Delivering Quality service by A. Parasuraman, Leonard Berry, and Valarie Zeithaml. They spoke about service excellence and a passion for delivering great customer service.
An entire generation of business and HR leaders (me included) were inspired to build a culture of customer centricity and service excellence using these ideas.
Such a culture meant leaders listening to customers and welcoming feedback, managers designing processes to deliver quality service and front-line employees trained to implement these processes with competence and courtesy.
What is the situation today?
Be it buying a car or a service, calling a Bank or an Airline, or reaching a call centre of any large product or service business (that is if you manage to reach a human being), the frontline sales or service person you deal with appears mostly preoccupied with obtaining (extracting) from you a rating of 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale.
I wonder if it is the confluence of social media, technology and incentives that is pushing everything down to the poor frontline employee and completely destroying the genuine intent of listening to customers. What is the culture that would perpetrate such a behaviour I wonder. Do you want to listen and learn or look good?
I even wonder if business leaders are giving the message to their front-line employees and customers that they just want to look good and don’t want to listen to customers.
If you really want to listen to customers, you must be accessible, be curious and humble. Not push someone to say that they are a “Net promoter”.
I genuinely believe something is seriously broken about our current approach to service excellence and customer centricity as a culture and the sooner we fix it, the greater the chances of not alienating your employees, leave alone your customers.
Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/hrFfosiBexY
