Business improvement and Service Design

By Mate Melia

For service-oriented businesses, the content of the service and its quality of delivery is what they sell. Firms in the product sector also look to their customer services to safeguard reputation, retain customers and win new ones. Significantly, the product may be good but the service operation may disappoint particularly when it has evolved piecemeal, by trail and error, over the years.

Services are “products”, designs in operation that incorporate ingredients, features and functions, start and ends and service operations must adapt to changing customer perception, expectations and loyalties. “Marks & Spencer”, the UK retailer and former exemplar of “excellence”, recently lost its ability to understand, buy and merchandise the goods its customers wanted. The customers had changed, but not the service, so “M & S” must now re-establish itself. New media and communication technologies also add to the ingredients available to service designers. Technology has driven travel agencies and banks to innovate or be overtaken by on-line competitors offering a round-the-clock service. Such forces call for renewed inspection of what our service is and how we can improve its delivery.
Services are where production and consumption meet. The customer is present and active. We can not stock “the service”, but must balance immediate capacity with demand. Its design, in concept and practice, has tangible and intangible components and its quality criteria can be made explicit even though quality is experienced, objective and subjective. The train was late, the meal was cold, it was too expensive and the sales staff was obstructive.
Interaction with customers is pervasive. In the leisure theme park, the customer relaxes and plays. Staff (the stage cast) enacts the service for their audience. They interact with clients who, when irritated, complain directly and want attention. They project friendship, sharing information and confidences with clients, yet their employer expects professional integrity, fidelity and loyalty. The service worker must field customer anxieties without undermining the company through loose talk.
A common headline is that, retaining a customer is cheaper than having to attract a new one. The loyal customer is an asset, a proposition confirmed by corporations that buy into the customer-base of the acquired company. Customers value their attachment and familiarity with a trusted service supplier and good service design means building in more ties of genuine affiliation.
One service design feature is where, in self-service, customers themselves willingly labour in the operational process: carrying out tasks and processing their own information. Self-service makes demand on their physical and mental capability. Information absorption, overload and omission may become problems. In a supermarket or an internet-based booking system, the customer and service system substitute for work normally done by employees. Less queuing time, fewer staff and lower transaction costs may result but with more emphasis on back-room staff, error trapping, correction, and reliability without staff intervention. The need for quality information, communication, maintenance and follow-up is enhanced.
The jobs of front-of-shop staff may also change, as they become advisers to customers rather than just low skilled operatives. However, service operation designers must allow for the abilities and preferences of the young, the old, the pregnant and the confused. If their needs are not met, then the service may be deemed insensitive and unfairly discriminating. The customer who cannot cope with or understand instructions may lack know-how, but if this leads to bad feeling then it will be communicated to a wider public.
Whether buying insurance, staying at a hotel or pumping it out at a fitness-centre, the ingredients and ambience of the service are produced and consumed as one. The planning and preparation enabling the consumption are hidden from the customer who sees and feels only “the service design”-as implemented. Some customers may not mind service aberrations, but many will not. If they know another local provider and can switch easily then they will walk off and be lost.
The problem of the service is that it can not be stocked. Unused, spare capacity is wasted, yet demand is variable. Thus, we look for flexibility to boost service volume at peak times. Queue management is a design issue here requiring analysis of patterns of service demand and contingency possibilities.
“This is what we will do if X happens. I have briefed the catering firm and they can deliver with one hour’s notice. Bao Cheng is on stand-by. The Blue Room can be opened into the Pink Room. The lists are prepared and we all know what to do. Spare chairs are under the stairs-just in case! The phone number of the Police station is on the wall!”
Service quality control through process design, quality specification and certification is attractive. Where zero defects is the objective, reliable processes and trained, flexible and willing staff are essential. However, intangibles in the service experiences are often difficult to specify. Customer perception of what they want and take from the service, what they like and dislike varies.
? Do you like shop assistants greeting you and offering you help the moment you enter a shop or do you see this as pushy and obsequious?
Patients at hospital outpatients’ clinic may feel it unacceptable to wait 40 minutes. However, some who visit as a routine, may be happy to wait enjoying the drama and the ability to chat.
We learn from good market research and feedback gaining awareness of the range of customer preferences, tangible and intangible experiences. One without the other may give a false picture. The tangibles involve defining the elements the customer should experience. We can observe whether a nurse has performed all the steps in a procedure, but it is less easy to attribute the patient’s perception of the nurse’s turn of phrase or the method of sign posting patient’s perception of the nurse’s turn of phrase or the method of sign posting in the hospital. Quality control for services differs because the customer is in the hospital. Quality control for services differs because the customer is engaged in the service experience. If we “quality test” a customer with a barrage of questions whilst they are enjoying the service. Then, we interfere with this experience. Yet, we need to monitor quality. Definitions of quality may be elusive, but without specifying our service standards, we cannot reliably monitor what is being achieved.
Consider the case of a package holiday. Before a holiday goes into the brochure, package holiday companies vet every travel and transfer arrangement, every hotel and apartment and the night fire of the resort/villa. They inform customers selecting a holiday about the disco noise, the cliffs and steps to the beach. Their resort representative visits the pool daily to meet clients, give help and filed complaints. But the rep’s ability to intervene with badly behaving clients or to find solutions for a family that hates their accommodation is limited. If resort is full, a representative cannot move a family just because their apartment overlooks the rubbish dump or is less well equipped than (as the client argues) the brochure specifies.
The low profit margin on package holidays prevents a company empowering local representatives to up-grade accommodation and refunds will be hard fought over. Holidaymakers are trapped and must either consume their holiday with its irritations or pay extra to fly home early. Clients may also be disgruntled by nature. The family wants to enjoy the holiday, but Miss Grump is determined to be miserable. Even the act of complaining spoils the holiday for the family hence the representative’s vital role as a listener, safety valve and counsellor.
Service Design Specification
Specifying standards and procedures is an engineering approach that stresses data, rationality, utilisation and predictability. However, if our service design introduces more routinisation, back-office processing and automation, then de-personalisation and reduced levels of customer contact will have an effect. Limiting a service package to secure uniformity, improve utilisation and reduce costs may restrict consumer choice. A TV company that groups its channels into packages A, B and C says, “take-it or-leave-it”, yet the individually tailored a la Carte service brings a premium price.
If routinisation allows employment if cheaper, less skilled staff, then we may lose the reliability and competencies needed for service quality.
Rules of Thumb in Service Design
A focus on the ingredients in the service package means examining these from the customer viewpoint, recognising the role of customer contact staff and performance monitoring. The whole package, in concept and application, requires definition and understanding. The service image as communicated (physically and conceptually) is critical in that a good service may be labelled “poor” if what it communicates fails to satisfy expectations. Problems will often be traced to how the service is presented. We must therefore
– Study the operation from the customer’s viewpoint. How are expectations and perceptions managed before, during and after the service? We may think we know our service system inside out, but our perception can be dated and we must free up our “bounded rationality”.
– Top management commitment to service quality needs to permeate workplace conversations about the organisation’s “mission”. Staff delivering the service communicates to customers even through their eyes and gestures. If top managers pay only lip service to their own service messages then those on the front-line will display cynicism.
The art of service operation design therefore includes conceiving and arranging the tangibles and intangibles, the necessary processes, actions and conditions. If managers are unclear, how will staff understand the service and how can we assess its achievement? Discussion promotes consensus and shared values. If back-room procedures and systems are “services to the servers”, then lets ensure that they support front-line service staff (internal clients). If they feel undervalued, this will be conveyed to external customers.
Do not forget that conformist behaviour, born of routine service procedures, may be too rigid. Good, agile staff cope better thus staff flexibility and recognition of competence by open, trusting organisation is essential.
If adequate resources are not allocated to monitoring, standards will loose energy and drift. Sampling techniques, questioners, “”taste” panels and even “mystery” shoppers give feedback on “received” service quality.
In summary, critical re-appraisal of the “service operation chain” requires identifying components and interactions, causes and effects and how each step, and then the whole, contributes to experience, transformation and delight. A service design approach promotes revitalisation of the service concept and operational innovation.