Instead, an increasingly irrelevant debate has been about how best to measure service.
Service measurement may now be getting past its sell-by date as a cure-all for managing service. Yet another new answer - the Customer Effort Score - asks you to measure how easy it is to do business with you, joining a growing list of favoured measures, each with its proponents. That may not help managers much.
Favourites include Net Promoter (NPS) - how many customers use you and refer you to others; Customer Satisfaction; and others going back to the granddaddy of them all, the Gaps score - do customer perceptions of your service match expectations?
Why all these measures? The debate became loaded because ability to measure carried an illusion - that managers thereby control the service that is measured. The original Gaps score was framed as part of the then-popular idea that quality-is-free, implying that managing service was about conforming to specification in some way.
Each preferred measure contained enough truth about service to make it attractive. Consider...
• Service operations will indeed be easier for a customer to use if they do conform to expectations, as implied by the Gaps Score;
• Happy customers really do use your service more often and refer you to others, the rationale of Net Promoter;
• The less effort it takes for customers to use you, the better your service will undoubtedly be - as measured by the Customer Effort Score.
If all of these measurements (and others) are equally valid, which ones should you use and when? That's where a service strategy can help you prioritise.
Managers generally agree - sometimes rather glibly - that great customer service is a good thing. Fewer are able to deliver it with consistency. There's a lot of confusion about how best to do so, a confusion reflected in the empty measurement debate.
The marketing reality is that customers use services in order to get value for themselves. Focusing on that value at the very least fills in the parts that are missing for them, so delivery
needs to pay attention to customer value. Delivery of value is at the core of service for customers: it's that which you need to direct.
Different parts of the company get involved in delivery of that service value. For instance...
• Value is delivered through (increasingly digitised) facilities.
• Value is supported by service people in an array of roles, not all of which are viewed favourably (for example, think Call Centres - from which the Effort Score emanates).
• Ultimately service, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Without a fine alignment to their expectations, service may not deliver the value customers seek.
To complicate things, those different parts (technology, people, and customers) are all moving components of the engine which delivers the service to each customer. They need to be coordinated, often in real time.
Your Service Strategy is how you coordinate those moving parts to ensure customer value each time. It's a strategic role involving a lot of internal and external communications, which may therefore devolve to the marketing executive.
Each service organisation must find its own way to coordinate the moving parts of their service. Not all do so systematically or with the strategic objective of enhancing customer value. Organisations do not all manage their service strategically.
That strategic focus on customer value will come from answering probing questions taking the perspective of how best to deliver value to customers; questions like...
• What is your Service Value Proposition to customers? How can you ensure that on their Service Journey, your customers receive this value consistently?
Systematising their journey can make your delivery of value more consistent.
• What should you be measuring, and why? What should your Service Dashboard look like? Good measurements can guide your delivery of value.
• With detailed in-depth input from your customers, what is your Service SWOT Analysis (the unique Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of your service)?
What actions should you prioritise to deliver value, including...
o Service diagnosis and tracking;
o Training and support;
o Your service delivery architecture;
o Service marketing for user and customer value?
Your priorities need to address the on-the-ground realities for your customers and employees of delivering the value.
To pull together the different moving parts of your service (including operations, employees and customers) and ensure value is delivered consistently, involve a small executive team in discussing and producing your own service strategy.
To help you develop your own strategic plan for your service, Wits Business School is putting on a 2-day MasterClass for Service Strategy with me and my colleagues. It includes external interviewers conducting in-depth interviews with five customers selected by you. To find out more, go to http://www.wbs.ac.za/programmes/executive_education/strategy.
