What It's All About

The customer-service hallmark takes customer service beyond "have a nice day" and what we often see as the usual, obvious, surface approaches to attracting and retaining customers. The framework addresses the concept of total customer service and provides a unique customer-service quality standard that is appropriate for all types and sizes of organisations. Adopting a holistic view of organisations is a recurring theme of this book. The customer-service hallmark has been developed by taking this view and by considering organisation-development (OD) approaches to managing improvement interventions.

The framework provides a practical and flexible methodology that guides, improves, sustains, and maximises customer-service effectiveness. It identifies four key integrated dimensions of customer service. The dependencies and interconnectivity of the four dimensions take into account functional relationships that position customer service as a coordinated strategic response from within and across the total organisation. Specifically, the four dimensions of customer service are as follows:

• Value stance to customers. Dimension one is concerned with ensuring that the organisation believes in and takes action that engages in satisfying customers' needs, wants, and expectations, and that customer service is positioned as a dominant value stance within and across the organisation. Beliefs and values influence an organisation's culture and climate. They drive macro (organisation) behaviour and influence micro (individual) behaviour. Most people will agree that what is openly valued and promoted is more likely to be adopted as something to be strived for.

• Service delivery. Dimension two is about making good the espoused value stance through the provision of meaningful customer-focused service-delivery action. Service delivery is concerned with all aspects of the organisation that influence or have the potential to influence quality and customer perception. Service delivery sits in the leadership-accountability box of "things I have to make sure are done." For everyone else, service delivery sits in the responsibility box of "things I have to make sure I do." Service delivery is concerned with continually trying to improve all aspects of organisation performance, including internal touchpoint management.

• Relationship management. Dimension three is concerned with maintaining ongoing mutually beneficial long-term relationships with customers. Relationship management involves continuous customer contact, generating information that enables understanding of customer needs, wants, and expectations—and then meeting them. Relationship management supports customer loyalty and retention.

• Customer perception. Dimension four involves proactively seeking and responding to information concerning customer perception of the actual felt experience of dealing with the organisation. Customer perception arises from the experience of being touched by the organisation. It influences customers' decisions on being involved in future business. Customer perception influences the wider view of the organisation's image. It is about managing access to customer feedback that can enable an organisation to build on positive perception and to take action that addresses and resolves identified negative customer perception.

The customer-service framework is synergistic. Each dimension reinforces and contributes to the synergy created by the framework as a whole. Each dimension reflects the cyclical and integrated nature of the framework and contributes to the overall impact of the framework. The presentation of the customer-service hallmark and its guiding framework is supported by a wide range of contributory concepts, approaches, theories, tools, techniques, ideas, and experiences that together weave a mesh of strands and threads that support the achievement of total customer service.

The idea behind the implementation of the customer-service hallmark is to harness and bring together organisational capacity, capability, and commitment; create a synergy of approach within and across all functions; promote cross-functional cooperation and harmony; and enable the provision of total customer service. Synergy considers the interconnectedness between all things. Achieving synergy makes the whole greater than the sum of the individual parts.

By adopting a holistic view, we incorporate environmental management as an integral component of strategic thinking and planning. Environmental management is about making sense of the business world that we live in. Environmental scanning and monitoring of data informs decision-making processes and improves the quality of decision-taking outcomes. By incorporating environmental data into decisions concerning operational implementation and achievement, we are more likely to ensure that structure, systems, processes, and resources are organised to focus on the achievement of strategic intent.

It is important to recognise that strategic ambition is not the same as strategic intent. Strategic ambition needs to take into account contributory conditions and circumstances, while strategic decisions need to take into account external environmental conditions in order to have a chance of being realistic. Making and taking strategic decisions involves understanding and dealing with the wide range of external environmental influences, demands, opportunities, and threats that impact on the likelihood of an organisation's ability to implement action to achieve strategic goals.

Strategic decision-making also includes understanding past and present relationship with customers in order to decide how best to enable...