Service Excellence

What would you consider as service excellence? How would you improve service excellence in an organization?

The main objective for a service providing organisation is to render the correct service to customer in order to achieve the desired outcome. For example, a customer patronising a fast food restaurant would expect his/her order to be placed and the food served accordingly. However, the organisation would need to do more in order to achieve service excellence instead of the bare minimum.

First of all, the service staff serving the customer must be attentive, upbeat and personal to make the customer feel relaxed and in a better mood to communicate. In this way, the service staff would be able to find the actual needs of the customer. Understanding the needs of the customer is essential as for certain type of services rendered, different customer would have different preferences and expectations. Knowing the customer needs would enable the organisation to render the correct services or deliver the correct product to the customer.

Another important point to note is that the services rendered to customer must be within the acceptable time frame. Most government organisations have a standard Service Level Agreement (SLA) which promises that the service would be rendered and customer can expect the desired outcome to be acheieved within the time frame unless complication arises.

Finally, the service staff should be sincere in serving the customer and if necessary try his/her best to go the extra miles to serve the customer. The overall quality of service and attitude of the service staff would determine whether the customer has an overall pleasant experience with the organisation.

There are three steps to improve service excellence in an organization.

First of all, the management can setup a feedback system to find out the current standard of the organisation service level and determine areas to improve on. The easiest way to do so is to have a simple questionnaire form with few simple questions for customer to fill up after the service has been rendered. After that, the results consolidated would help the management to plan and formulate ways to improve service quality.

After the management has determined areas to improve on, the service staff would most likely need to receive some form of trainings to acquire the right skills to serve customers better. Nevertheless, the feedback system would remain so that the management can determine if the service quality increases after the service staff have received training and after implementing any other additional measures like improving facilities.

Lastly, the management can think of an incentive system in which the customer can express gratitude to any service staff for excellent service rendered. This would motivate service staff to work harder to achieve service excellence for the organisation.