Content area
Full text
Imagine a new law requiring companies to provide customers with 100 percent satisfaction or give double their money back.
Managers would be forced to solve problems that were previously passed off as "part of doing business." In order to survive, they would make every effort to figure out what, exactly, leaves a customer satisfied.
In all likelihood, a lot of companies would suffer huge losses and go out of business.
Most managers don't want a world with a law like that; they are repulsed by the thought that their livelihoods could rest so strongly on the whims of customers.
For the daring, however, a law that requires total customer satisfaction is simply a challenge to improve operational efficiency, worker morale, client retention and service.
In the real world, no one has yet pushed for "customer satisfaction legislation," but the first rule of business remains that "the customer is king."
With this in mind, some managers are using service guarantees to lay down their own laws; instead of being driven out of business, they find that the guarantee frequently drives the company, pushing service performance beyond previous expectations.
For years, managers have held that service can't be guaranteed. While products have a failure rate that can be analyzed to determine warranty costs, service is usually consumed as it is provided. You can't pre-inspect a worker's mood or, for that matter, an engine tune-up; a late delivery can't be called back for repair.
But a service guarantee can be self-fulfilling; promising perfect service forces a company to actually deliver it and, in the process, forces managers to identify and resolve the root causes of service-delivery problems.
The service guarantee process is elegantly simple, and can be done at companies of any size or by departments within companies.
First, create a customer-driven standard for service--"absolutely, positively overnight" is one that pops in mind--preferably above the top level of service provided in your industry. This galvanizes the process, telling customers what to expect--and thereby defining customer satisfaction--while letting employees know exactly the type of service you intend to provide.
Writing this service promise immediately creates certain changes:
* It forces managers to define customer needs and develop meaningful measures of customer satisfaction.
* It forces managers to understand...