Service has become the golden fleece of enterprise. Scarcely a company exists that does not have service excellence or delighting customers as a part of its mission and value statements, but few companies actually make the grade in excellent delivery.
"Part of the problem corporate leaders face is that there is no standard by which they can measure their service capabilities," says Barry Townsend, Unisys VP for customer-focused business excellence, Europe and Africa. "Consequently, companies have a difficult task in measuring their own service in comparison to their peers and competitors."
Six years ago, Unisys launched its Management Today Service Excellence Awards programme to create a measurable service excellence model and annually determine which companies delivered the best service in the UK.
The initial stage of the awards programme is a questionnaire completed by all companies wanting to compete. "The questionnaire was initially designed in partnership with business academia in the UK to be a benchmark of service excellence in that market," Townsend notes. "It is upgraded annually as each competition is completed to include the latest thinking and research in the field."
All entrants must complete the form judging various aspects of their business processes and operations. Categories the service excellence awards focus on include financial services, B2B, retail and consumer, manufacturing and engineering, and public sector organisations.
The entries are assessed by a team of professionals from various industries and educational institutions and the results returned to the respective companies with recommendations on improving their service. The top four companies in each category are singled out and the assessors then pay these companies a visit to see their operations in action. "This is not a courtesy call," warns Townsend, "but a full audit of the company in which every aspect of the company`s business model is examined. Once this lengthy process has been completed, an overall winner is selected."
Townsend explains that the whole process is designed to highlight generic and category-specific best practices from which the business community can learn. "The finalists form a close network of companies that often deal with each other after the awards are over - because they know the service levels they can expect from each other. In fact, last year`s winner reported a 140% increase in turnover during the year following its award."
Townsend adds that Unisys is not sponsoring the awards from a purely altruistic motive: "The best practices of the winner and the finalists are thoroughly dissected. One reason is to improve the process for next year`s awards; the other is to enable us to apply these leading concepts in our own organisation."
Service excellence is a difficult concept to grasp and even more complex to implement. "It includes all the little things companies often ignore, as well as the major issues normally associated with service." Townsend says there are four key principles found in all companies delivering service excellence:
1. The companies are all customer-focused. They do not only talk the talk, but everyone, from the owners and directors down, walk the customer-focused walk as well.
2. Employees are committed to customers and are supported with technologies and processes.
3. These companies also have an internal service ethos that pervades the organisation. They treat each other as customers and the process is automatically extended externally.
4. Companies that deliver service excellence are flexible, a key to doing business. Many large companies find flexibility and adapting to customers` needs a problem, but a company truly focused on excellence listens to customers and then change to meet their needs.
The motive for entering the awards is not only to win or be among the finalists. Each entrant receives a report detailing their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to their competitors` and peers` best practices. Townsend notes that independent analysis puts the value of these reports at between lb12 000 and lb18 000, a win for UK companies who only pay lb95 to enter the competition.
"To show the pure business impact of service excellence, the UK government has calculated that if every company in the UK achieves, at best, an average score, it would add lb900 billion to the bottom line of the economy in terms of improved productivity."
Townsend was recently in SA to determine the viability of running a similar service excellence programme here. Given the benefits of only average compliance with best practices, the impact a concerted service excellence programme could have on the local economy would be enormous.
"Of course, service excellence is a journey, not a destination," Townsend concludes. "Even the winners in the Unisys Management Today Service Excellence Awards come back year after year to reassess themselves, compare themselves to the best in the business and learn from others - as is the nature of all leaders that succeed over the long-term."
Share
