When you go beyond the expectations of your customers and offer an industry-leading experience that truly bowls over them – then such activity is understood as Service Excellence.
If you want to have a loyal customer base who buys again-and-again from you or you want to increase the repeat footfalls of your store visitors, Service Excellence will be the key. However, the process of accomplishing this excellence doesn’t occur by some coincidence.
You need to come up with a well-organized procedure that is further actualized all through the organization. By the end of this post, you will get to know everything necessary for incorporating service excellence. So, let us started unfolding the concepts-
Table of Contents
Introduction to Services Excellence
Service is a give-and-take relationship wherein there is no exchange of goods.
Some benefits are transferred from one stakeholder to the other. There are many types and forms of services. Also, several companies offer various kinds of services to consumers.
In any business, customer satisfaction is of the most considerable importance.
In the case of the companies providing services instead of products, its importance increases manifolds. It is because service is all that the company relies on.
Whether the reputation of the company or the revenue being generated, everything depends on the service and the quality of the service. This quality of service is service excellence.
What is Services Excellence?
Service is for the people. It is meant to satisfy the demands of the customer.
As the term rightly suggests, service excellence means excellent treatment and excellent service quality to your customers.
Service excellence does not necessarily mean increasing the expectations of the customer and then struggling to meet them. It merely means delivering what you have promised. Before providing any service, the problems, requirements, and expectations of the customer are considered.
The act of meeting these expectations and solving the challenges of the customer effectively is service excellence.
Importance of Services Excellence
Wherever a service is concerned, service excellence comes into play. It is of great value, and the reasons why it is so are listed below-
1. Attract more customers and excellence
More the number of customers, who avail of your service, more will be your profits. So, it is beneficial to have more customers. Service excellence helps you do so. It enables you to create a good impact on your current customers. The customers who are happy and satisfied with your service spread the word.
2. Less negative customer feedback
The success of the service provided depends on the input the consumers give. Positive feedback adds a feather to the cap, whereas negative feedback drags the service provider’s position down.
Hence, the service should be excellent to minimize negative feedback.
3. Lesser clashes with the customers
In the case of bad service, the customers get agitated and file complaints against the same. It can cause substantial losses to the company. However, if you consistently provide excellent service, there are far lesser chances of getting into clashes with the customers.
4. Profitability
Apart from the benefits of having a good reputation and positive feedback, the tangible benefit of service excellence is the profit the company gains.
For a service that is assured of excellent quality, consumers are ready to pay higher prices. Also, the customer’s network continues increasing, which helps in getting more revenue and, in turn, increases profits.
5. Branding
Branding is the process of establishing a brand in the market. We all know about companies that have been providing the same services for over decades but have still stood firm because of service excellence.
It helps us understand that to get name and fame; your services have to be of excellent quality.
Qualities that help you achieve Services Excellence And Success
Service excellence is of high quality. To achieve this, you need to have specific values and abilities. Given below are some of them.
1. Analysis of the situation
Every situation is different, and there is something to learn from every situation. The one who understands this can succeed in achieving service excellence. There needs to be a proper analysis of any given situation from different perspectives.
2. Awareness of all the concerned factors
In any service-providing company, there are various stakeholders. All of them observe, evaluate, and analyze them in different ways.
But, if you are aware of all these perspectives and consider all these factors while designing service, you will emerge excellently.
3. Empathy towards the consumers
Empathy understands what the other person is feeling and what he/she is going through. In this case, if you try and empathize with the consumers, they will get friendlier with you and become easy to handle.
It will also give you a better insight into their problems and help you resolve them in a better way.
4. Questioning but not doubting
Indeed, doubting will not lead you anywhere – but, interviewing with a tinge of curiosity helps. No service is perfect, and it is essential to admit that even the service you are providing has scope for improvement. This will make you ask questions, and the eagerness to continually improve will make your service better.
5. Maintaining positive relationships
Providing a service is not a job done by only one person. There is a team of people working on it, and then, there is a network of stakeholders, including clients.
If you succeed in maintaining healthy and positive relationships in these networks, your service will get excellent.
6. Responsible attitude
If you hold just one person responsible for service excellence, you will never achieve it.
However, if each team member has a sense of responsibility and works wholeheartedly towards offering excellent service, this attitude will go a long way.
7. Adaptability
These days, the markets are continually changing. The requirements and expectations of consumers are changing at a faster pace. Hence, even the service needs to evolve.
You should design a service that caters to the client’s expectations and adapts to newer ways of working. That will help you keep with the times.
8. Bouncing back
Every business and every service faces problems irrespective of how good they are. But, instead of getting bogged down by these setbacks, the one who learns and comes out with a better version of the services emerges excellent. Therefore, dealing with complaints and negative feedbacks in a good stride helps achieve service excellence.
Now, after knowing different qualities that can help a business in ensuring service excellence, let us have a look upon the critical steps of ensuring service excellence that plays a pivotal role in making best-performing Customer Service Business Model-
6 Steps of ensuring Excellence in Service
1. Having Vision and Mission Statements
Having a vision and mission that is known, possessed, and comprised of each employee is an integral part of service excellence.
Companies that offer excellent customer service have vision statements that explain what they seek to be in the future and mission statements tell about their motivations and things they stand for.
2. Having clear Business Objectives
Successful businesses with a good culture of service excellence have clear, straightforward, and quantifiable business objectives that everyone in the organization knows.
Such companies not only have objectives related to growth and profitability but also have service-oriented objectives.
3. Having Service Standards
Having service standards is essential for explaining to the employees precisely about the activities, practices, and behavioral patterns that are anticipated from them in ensuring excellence in day-to-day performances.
4. Including Intervention and Learning Strategy
For ensuring service excellence, businesses need to ensure that their service philosophy (that is the vision, business objectives, mission, and service standards) are interlaced into each part of the hierarchical structure of the organization.
5. Ensuring Organizational Alignment
Top-rated companies that ensure service excellence utilize each communication channel or resource to continually channelize their service philosophy to every level of the organization.
Different mediums that are used as communication resources in this are meetings, posters, wallet cards, bulletin boards, newsletters, etc.
6. Measuring Service Excellence
Finally, you need to measure performances and ensure leadership accountability to track service excellence. For this, you can use basic scoreboards that employees can use for tracking the company‘s success in ensuring excellence.
Final Thought on Service!
Service excellence is a wonderful quality by which the service provider can achieve fame, success, and financial profits. There are some qualities and abilities that one needs to master to be served excellent.
Incorporating a culture of service excellence in your organization is a journey, a continuous process, and not the final destination. Indeed, there is no alternate way or convenient solution for this.
With the six steps mentioned above, you will be able to elevate customer experience from average to extraordinary that will ultimately foster service excellence and a loyal customer base.
What according to you, are the essential factors behind ensuring service excellence in your industry?
Liked this post? Check out the complete series on Services Marketing
