"I don't have a legal
definition of pornography, but I know it when I see it."
--
Supreme Court Justice
Potter Stewart
I was the
CIO for a startup company called FirstWave. FirstWave was a very
unusual business proposition, so unusual that I often found it
difficult to describe just what business we were in.
It was so difficult because it was so unique -
there aren’t any organizations quite like it.
[Uniqueness is a special trait that is essential to being
competitive – more on that in a future blog.]
And I must admit that I occasionally saw eyes glaze over when
I talked about a membership organization, network of services,
time-saving assistance ...
A friend was
right in suggesting that sometimes it's just easier to say that we
were a buying service or something that they had heard before.
So how do
you describe your business when friends ask?
I find it more relevant, as well as accurate, to think of
most knowledge economy organizations as being in the service
business. A colleague once stated that "every business is a service
business". Most products
can be thought of as services if, as Harvard Professor
Rosabeth Moss Kantor suggests, you look at what it does, not
just what it is.
The
customer's assessment of quality is a subjective one.
Just as Justice Stewart, they know it when they see it.
If that is true of quality, then what of
service, which most people
think of as downright smokey by comparison.
Here are a
few elements that we must consider on designing and delivering
service to our customers.
§
Understand -- and meet -- the
customers' expectations.
§
Let our commitment, cooperation,
responsiveness, expertise, and courtesy show.
§
Be especially determined in
problem situations, those "moments of truth".
That's
easily enough said, but what do we know of how customers judge
service? How do they
know it when they see it?
Research done by the Marketing Science Institute is perhaps
the clearest insight anyone has offered.
Ten specific attributes were identified as being the
important elements on which customers judge service.
They are:
§
Reliability -
dependability in meeting commitments and expectations
§
Responsiveness
- willingness to help, promptness in doing so
§
Credibility of
the service providers
§
Communication
- candor, articulation
§
Competence -
skill, knowledge, expertise
§
Ease
of Access to service providers (reaching them when they are wanted)
§
Courtesy
§
Understanding/knowing
the customer's business
§
Security -
freedom from danger, risk (including
corporate politics), doubt
§
Tangibles -
physical attributes of the product or service (appearance of people,
facilities, products, etc.)
I’ll share
more of the particulars in future blogs, but bear in mind that
reliability and responsiveness comprise almost 70% of what customers
call service. Customer
satisfaction is a key measure of our organizational performance.
We can’t get better at these things unless we dimension just
where we stand in the minds of our customers.
And we want our customers to use a consistent yardstick, one
we understand very well ourselves, to measure just how valuable or
un-valuable our services are.
In the meantime, remember that
in its purest form, we are not just in the [fill
in the blank with the way you defined your
organization]business -- we're all in the service business.