Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group
Our research, initiated last year and extended this year, has reinforced the conclusion that certain strategies are proving to be most effective in creating increased revenue by providing the customer with what they require. However, translating a strategy into a realisable goal is not always achievable, top down, because there is not a clear understanding of the drivers or customer environment at senior level within the supplier and sometimes too much emphasis is placed upon dealing with symptoms, rather than tackling actual causes. Converting a strategy into an achievable goal is not achievable bottom-up, unless there is top-down commitment! Successful companies focus on the customer’s developing needs to anticipate the need for change and not wait till the customers leave. They have effectively learned to combine top-down commitment with bottom-up understanding through close attention to the experience of their customers and their customer interface staff.
When dealing with a service organisation, working from the “bottom-up” means working from the customer interface, and therefore the approach must recognise the customer will be responsible for significant input and reaction to change. A major change in operation might require moving customer interface staff from one area to another; this will obviously have an impact on the customer interface staff, but also their customers, which could jeopardise any relationship that the customer interface staff have managed to develop with individual customers, using the processes in place. The processes can pose the biggest problem to both customers and customer interface staff, and a new support person might not be able to provide the protection afforded the customer: the original support person able to manoeuvre against the worse excesses of the processes, while they may not be clearly visible to the new support person. Making changes without considering the need to examine the process or the way it has been modified is inadvisable, and result in a symptom being addressed, but the cause remaining unresolved, usually with a consequent loss of customer loyalty. Poor processes can have a significantly negative impact on customer loyalty, when the customer has very different opinions about what they value as opposed to what is delivered.
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