SERVICE STANDARD

Service Standard:

Service quality standard in India sometimes fail to match up to the world class standards. I want to share with you some instances to highlight the bad and good experiences.

Let’s begin with my restaurant experience. It was one of the busy weekends in a middle class restaurant. I ordered fried rice and my favorite dish, “Thai Curry”. In fact, before ordering, I enquired whether “Thai Curry” was available there, since the item did not appear  in the menu card. The waiter replied with his usual, “Yes, Sir”.

After spending about 45 minutes of my weekend time ‘WAITING’ and ‘REMINDING’, I got frustrated, and told the waiter that I am cancelling the order. There came a rude response that I cannot cancel the order because ‘THEIR CHEF’ (Guess he learns the recipe only after the order!!) had already begun preparing the item. Finally, I got the food.

To my surprise, the Thai Curry, as the restaurant claimed, was a ‘THICK GREEN GRAVY MANCHURIAN’. I quickly realized that they do not prepare Thai Curry. On enquiring, the waiter continued his stand on the dish and said that was how Thai Curry is prepared.

I called the manager and asked him to ‘identify’ the dish (First ever time, I conducted food quiz! And I hope that was the last time too!!) . He was wondering what to say and asked his waiter what it was. I then revealed to him that his staff insists on calling it Thai Curry. He agreed that it was not Thai Curry and they don’t serve Thai curry there. He accepted the mistake from their end, but justified that waiters sometimes mess-up due to the crowd!! I was amused by this reply because, there were still 4 -5 un-occupied tables!!

The duty manager clearly lacked  the skills to deal with this kind of situation. These managers are not really empowered; they lack discretion, and  rarely think on their feet.

Finally, I spoke to the owner of the restaurant and explained the situation. But he made no attempt to apologize and did no damage control. Instead, he said that when I come next time, they  will take care. I lost all the hope I had. Now God only can help him! He didn’t realize the simple fact that an irate customer will not only ‘not come back’ but also he will talk about this to 100s of his friends and relatives.

 Finally, I had my fried rice without any gravy and came out of the restaurant with fried heart and fried weekend.

 

On the other hand, one satisfied customer will send you to hundred others.

There is no process for service recovery in the above mentioned restaurant case.

Service Recovery means, just to put this ina proper perspective, a good service can transform an experience after something terrible has happened. The Service recovery conceptual diagram, I have referred here, shows the point where service failure happens and how service recovery will make the customer loyalty scale to go up.

The above mentioned restaurant is not aware that they are not selling any product but giving the customer “the experience”. If the experience is so bad how can he expect the customer to come back?

What is customer experience? It is difficult to define, but it is the way he feels or carries or perceives the service.

Let’s look at the following definition of Customer Experience:

 

A Customer Experience is an interaction between an organization and a customer. It is a blend of an organization’s physical performance, the senses stimulated and emotions evoked, and measured against customer expectations across all the touch points.

Maxine Clark is the CEO of the highly successful Build-A-Bear Work-shop. Emotions are embedded into the design of their great experience. Let us hear what Maxine has to say:

"Emotions are a key part of our offering and something we have deliberately designed into our experience. We want to connect with our Guests and make sure that they build a connection with their bear so they make a new friend for life. Connecting on an emotional level is an important part of the brand experience".

Another example to quote on Customer Experience from the  recent article I read. In the 70’s; the Taj Group empowered waiters at restaurants to say to a guest who returned a dish, ‘If you don’t like it sir, then it’s on the house. At the time, this was considered a big breakthrough because in the prevailing five star culture of the day this was definitely to create a positive customer experience.

Not only restaurants but any business treating the customers as burden, paying little attention to the customer experience will prove detrimental in the long run. Who knows the organization may not even be there in the long run!!

Service offerings have got emotional value. I am reading a book named "The DNA of Customer Experience"  “How emotions drive value” by Colin Shaw. Let me share few points from the book which is very relevant to the subject I am writing in this blog.

There are four stages or clusters in the hierarchy of emotional value.

1.    Destroying cluster

2.    Attention Cluster

3.    Recommendation Cluster

4.    Advocacy Cluster

Destroying Cluster:

The first one and the lowest in the pyramid is the irritated, neglected and unhappy customer. That is the emotion the customer is carrying. This is called destroying cluster of emotions. You need a method to measure and monitor the emotional engagement of your customers that truly understands the emotions they are feeling. From my restaurant example, whatever they have evoked is a destroying cluster of emotions. Not accepting the mistake and no damage control (service recovery) etc.

Attention Cluster:

This cluster has got the direct impact on the customer spend. If you evoke emotions like good food, attention, good responsive staff and nice ambience or environment etc., customers will spend more money and will refer to many people. They will eventually become your loyal customers. Why I say eventually, you need to do this continuously, lest, these emotions will wane.

Recommendation Cluster:

This cluster deals with the emotions like focused, safe, cared for, valued, trusted. Just to sight an example. I travel a lot across India. Usually I book in a particular Airline only. I feel always safe and have trust that they maintain the aircraft properly adhering to all the safety norms and no compromise on that. This Airline always takes care of the following

1.    On-time departures

 

2.    Check-in procedure

 

3.    Professionalism of the crew

4.    The quality of food, just to name a few.

 
Whereas about the other airlines, I don’t want to mention the name of the airline (every time our government comes to their rescue from the financial burden using tax payers’ money), I have heard a lot of complaints about bad customer experience and compromising safety regulations etc., against this carrier. How will I feel safe to travel in that airline and recommend?

Advocacy Cluster:

This cluster has got two emotions basically, happy, pleased and delighted.

After about a month of this horrible experience (as I described about my restaurant experience), I came across a contrasting service by a renowned pizza delivery chain. This chain has been doing their best in keeping their customers delighted!! (one step above keeping customers just satisfied). We had ordered a pizza of our choice that arrived warm, instead of their usual HoT! We expressed our dissatisfaction on this to the delivery boy and we were immediately given a discount on our next order!

Though, this chain would not be able to take corrective steps on the current order, being a home delivery, they have given the authority to their delivery boys and call centre executives to go to the extent of allowing discounts on the next order, if a customer has complaints on a particular order! This means a lot since, the people who are face-to-face with customers themselves can put up a smile on a dis-satisfied customer’s face!! I would call this ‘An incredible approach’! 

 
If an organization is serious about building the “Customer Loyalty”, it needs to take care of the “Customer Experience”

Everyone wants to be a successful person in life. There are several bottlenecks and shortcomings in the way of achieving your goals. Albert Einstein has said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them".

 I recently came across a video of the Robin Sharma who wrote a book, ‘The Monk Who Sold Ferrrari’ . In this video he spoke about 5 important steps that are to be self-analyzed to become a successful person in life. Through the video he insisted that if we need to progress in life and lead our life successfully, we have to reinvent and restructure our personal life.

I take this opportunity to wish you all a successful and rewarding year ahead.

For the sake of better clarity, I have structured the write-up as bullet points. Please sit back, relax and enjoy reading. But, once read, arise, get geared-up and start taking actions on the following steps. Here’s the 5 step process by Mr. Sharma:

1.        Celebration:

                                                               i.      List out the good things that happened to you in the past.

                                                             ii.       What wins should you celebrate? For example, it can be appreciations you received, big / small achievements, special instances like wonderful moments with your kids, clients, friends etc.

                                                            iii.      This will build a sense of confidence in you.  In this fast paced life, we may not even notice or remember good things happening in our life. Just recollecting and recording will give you enormous confidence and direction in life.

2.       Education:

                                                               i.      Here’ where you analyse what you have learnt in the past 12 months? Get the better awareness, thereby make better choices and reap better results.

                                                             ii.      Write down the 3 best business lessons you have learnt in this period.

                                                            iii.      Secondly write down the 3 best life lessons and what were the respective results?

                                                           iv.      Next, ask yourself what you were doing when you achieved your best results in the past 12 months. Jot down the best practices you adopted, / what was going on in your life when you achieved these results.

3.       Clarifications

Clarity precedes mastery.

                                                               i.      What are the 5 big things that must happen in your life in next 12 months?

                                                             ii.      Top 5 values of yours. Values drive your behavior and shape your personality. Freedom, beauty, relationship, health are examples of the values you can set.

                                                            iii.      Write down the top 15 Goals for the next 12 months?

1.       Creativity + audacity = mastery – Formula for identifying the goals.

2.       You need to have a goal that makes you unconformable, nervous and that challenges your status quo. My example to this would be of a reserved person setting his goal of public speaking or meeting with strangers.

4.       Graduation:

                                                               i.      Plan of action

1.       From the above points, draw a month by month plan with clear details of actions that you need to take.

5.       Visualization:

                                                               i.      Commitment is the key in this final step.

                                                             ii.      Emotionally engage with what your life will look like in the key areas of life, including financial, work, family etc.

                                                            iii.      With vivid details and color, picture yourself as to how your life will look if you achieve everything in the 5 step process.

Once this 5 step process is designed, revisit this picture every few days. This will ensure that consciously / sub-consciously, your behavior is aligned with your expectations.

Thank you for your time and Best of Luck for your successful LIFE.