Chapter 4

 Standardized—Spelling Out Good Performance

Imagine that your company picks up the tab for you to eat lunch at a particular restaurant every day (that does take some imagination, doesn’t it?). Now, this restaurant is a nice place with table service. So far, so good.

Some days, the host warmly greets you by name and seats you immediately at your favorite table in the sunny corner. Other days, you stand at the entrance for ten minutes, get a grunt from the host and get seated after waiting another ten minutes. Then you find yourself right smack dab in front of the swinging doors to the kitchen. Even worse, on other days, no one greets you, and you have to go find an empty table, and probably end up at one you have to wait to be cleaned. Then you learn the kitchen is out of most items you like. No wonder no one was eager to seat you.

What’s good about this restaurant? It’s free! Remember?

But if it weren’t, wouldn’t you be a lot more likely to spend your own money there if it treated you well all the time instead of making your lunch hour some kind of culinary Russian roulette?

Consistently good service isn’t an accident. It comes from standardizing your approach to it. That means leaving nothing to chance or to the mood or whims of employees.

You’re about to discover how to assure consistently great service through standardization, which basically breaks into:

• Determining the service standards you should have
• Setting the standards
• Implementing them
• Assuring you meet your standards

Before leaping into how you can create the standards that assure your customers great service, let’s take a quick look at why standards are so critical.

The “Instant of Absolute Judgment”

Customer service is often provided in brief interactions that only last for a few seconds at a time. Just seconds! But the impact could last a lifetime. That’s because customers make emotional judgments about a company. Any single interaction can create an impression that will forever color a customer’s attitude toward buying from your company.

Some people call this spontaneous evaluation a “moment of truth” (a phrase coined by Jan Carlzon of Scandinavian Airlines). We don’t think that term goes nearly far enough in describing the potential impact on your business. We prefer to call it “The Instant of Absolute Judgment.”

It can take years to build a reputation, but only a second to destroy it. Crushingly sad but amazingly true.

If you please a customer over and over again, she’ll probably keep coming back. Disappoint her now and then, and the loyalty bond begins to erode. The customer drifts away a little bit at a time.

Upset a customer, make her angry, or let her down with a big disappointment, and you’ll likely lose her business for the rest of her life.

Standards to the Rescue

You can dramatically increase the odds that your business will deliver consistently good service when you set service standards. They describe precisely how your business should achieve certain measurable service levels.

Examples of Service Standards

Standards should be unique to your industry and to your business in particular. To help you understand what we mean by standards, here are some examples:

• The toll-free helpline will be staffed 20 hours a day by certified technicians.
• Every caller to the helpline will get through to the help center on their first call (no busy signals) at least 97.5 percent of the time.

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   Word to the Wise
  Service standards are guidelines specifying measurable activities that help your employees to please customers. The standards are supported by organizing and supporting work to deliver services in a consistent fashion.

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• After connecting with the telephone help center, a caller should wait no more than 3 minutes to speak to a live technician.
• Callers should receive a satisfactory solution to their problems on their first call at least 93 percent of the time.

Five Initial Questions

Interested in setting standards for your own organization? Great! Here are five questions to stimulate your thinking.

1. What work do we do that customers care about?
2. How might we do a better job at that work?
3. Ideally, to what level of perfection would we like to perform that work?
4. What are the expectations of our customers on how we should perform the work?
5. How can we ensure that customers enjoy dealing with us?

At this point, don’t worry about having the answers to all those questions for all your work. Right now, we’re just setting the stage for creating standards for your business.

Using Your “SMARTS”

To have a meaningful impact, service standards should meet certain, uh, standards. When you do actually start creating standards, they need to operate in a certain way to really have the impact you’re looking for. We’ve created a helpful acronym to describe effective service standards, SMARTS.

S—Specific

Issuing instructions to employees that say, “Be friendly to customers,” is not specific. (For example, friendly to one person could mean merely not hanging up on someone.) It is vague, broad, and open to many different interpretations. So is, “Generally, answer the phone as soon as possible.” An example of a specific standard is: When answering the phone, answer it by the second ring and say, “It’s my pleasure to serve you today. How may I help?”

Effective standards are specific as to:

• Who the standard applies to
• What actions are expected
• How you’ll know if you’re meeting the standard (see “M—Measurable” immediately following)

M—Measurable

You need to know if you’re achieving the goal or not. Measurable means quantifiable, like in numbers. “Credit representatives will answer incoming customer calls by the second ring 96 percent of the time,” is a specific, measurable goal.

The specific goals you set for your organization need to flow from your customers’ expectations and your current level of performance. Later in this chapter, we give you a step-by-step process for setting your specific standards.

A—Achievable

It’s fashionable to talk about “stretch goals,” but employees need to believe they can achieve the standards. Or they won’t even try. Setting standards means far more than merely identifying the goals. Just as importantly, it means designing and supporting the work process so you can achieve the standard on an on-going basis. This could involve a major structural change to the way you currently do your work.

R—Relevant to Customers

This is the most important characteristic. While there are a million operations you could set standards for in your company, your priority focus must be on the things that matter to customers and influence their buying decisions. Set standards for things that customers will notice and appreciate. The more relevant your standards are, the greater the likelihood your employees will implement them.

T—Timely

Good service is more than just the actions you take to assist customers. It’s also the time you take to serve them. Solving a problem during the customer’s first call has infinitely more value for most customers than the same outcome a month from now. Your service standards should include a goal and measure for time performance. (You’ll find an extensive method for determining the right standards for your organization later in this chapter.)

S—Supported by the Organization

Service isn’t just the activities of customer contact people. It’s the tools, systems, and processes that support those efforts. Employees can’t be better than the system allows them to be, no matter how much the boss carries on about improving service. The standards should become an essential part of employees’ job descriptions and evaluations. Every employee, from the CEO on down, must be held accountable to these standards. If any employee is not held accountable, the standards will fall apart.

Fill In the Blanks

Want to create a service standard? Keep all the SMARTS points in mind, and then just fill in the simple formula that follows the example below.

To give you an idea of what the finished product looks like, we’ll start with an example from a grocery store, followed by a format you can use to create your own standards.

Example

We will serve our customers with quick check-outs by cashiers in our express line, with a performance measure of having no more than three customers waiting in any cashier line and a target maximum wait time of under two minutes for any customer at any time. We will accomplish this objective by:

1. Refresher training sessions for all cashiers on efficient check-out procedures, with follow-up sessions every quarter.
2. Operating additional express lanes during peak times for express customer loads.

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    At Your Service
   Even the best-intending employees may not consistently deliver great service if you don’t define what it is. Standards are not rigid rules meant to constrain behavior. Instead, they are guidelines that remove uncertainty and assure consistency. Employees can more fully invest themselves in delivering great service— with less stress and more creativity—when they know what’s expected from them.

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3. Increased staffing during peak times for express customer loads.
4. Friendly monthly competitions for speed and accuracy among all cashiers, with token rewards for winners and all participants.

Create Your Own

Objective: We will serve our customers with ________________ {name the specific task goal related to customer requirements}.

Performer: By _______________ {identify who’s performing the work}.

Measure: With a performance measure of ________________ {the time, dollar, or other measures you are trying to achieve}.

Support factors: We will accomplish this objective by _______________,_______________, and _______________ {the organizational support that will make the performance improvement possible}.

When you create specific standards, you make your expectations for performance clear to your employees. You define great service in order for them to deliver it consistently.

A System of Information

Don was shopping for office supplies in one of the nation’s largest retail dealers. He saw a “Sale” sign over the brand of transparencies he uses to make color overheads for his management development presentations. The attractive savings made an impulse purchase virtually certain. One small catch. The sign said the savings came from an “Instant Rebate.”

What is an “Instant Rebate”? Don didn’t know, and neither did the friendly but not knowledgeable staff at the “Customer Service” counter. One thought it meant there was a rebate coupon tucked “somewhere in that rebate display over there.” Don wandered off to plow through scores of manufacturer rebate coupons strewn about the display. Finding none for the transparencies, it was back to the Service desk (and we use the term loosely here).

After three employees pleasantly said the customer service-speak equivalent of “duh,” finally the store manager was summoned. He confessed that he didn’t know what an Instant Rebate was either. But at least he had the good sense to authorize ringing up the sale on the spot with a credit for the Instant Rebate, whatever it is. Then he went down the aisle and removed the sign from the shelf.

Lesson: Good service requires a system of information, procedures, and systems. If the people charged with implementing your slogans, deals, or objectives don’t have a clue as to how to deliver on them, then they can’t please your customer.

What Should You Standardize?

To show you how service standards can impact an operation, let’s take a little trip together. Picture this. You’re going on a business trip to a distant city. You’re going to fly there.

In playing out this scenario, you’ll encounter several opportunities to receive great customer service or big-time disappointments.

Taking Off

As you read the following account, watch for the many places where the airline might want to standardize service to meet your expectations as it flies you from here to there. Follow along:

• A taxi drops you off at the airport. How long should you wait at the curb before a skycap welcomes you to the airline and checks your bag?
• Should the skycap tell you your flight’s assigned departure gate? Should he write it on your ticket? Should he enter your arrival into the computer so you don’t need to check-in at the gate?
• Should the skycap give you explicit directions to the gate?
• When you get into the airport itself, how far should you walk before you see a monitor with the gate assignments so you can double-check the departure gate?
• How far should you wander before seeing a sign pointing you in the right direction?
• When you get to the gate, how long in advance should you be able to check-in for your flight?
• Even if you’re just allowing the bare minimum time to make your flight (doesn’t everybody!), even at peak time on a very busy travel day, how long is the maximum time you should have to wait in line before being greeted, welcomed, and checked-in to your flight?

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   At Your Service
  Every aspect of a customer’s experience might be improved by a service standard. Take nothing for granted. Physically walk through the entire customer experience and note every step, every part of the process, that could potentially disappoint or delight a customer. Great service is no accident. It results from close scrutiny— and careful management—of the total customer experience, detail by painstaking detail.

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• How long should the boarding process take?
• If you are a very frequent flier, what special treatment—if any—should you receive?
• If you hardly ever fly, how can the airline make you feel welcome and special, too?
• When you board the flight, should you be greeted, welcomed, and offered directions to your seat and assistance with your carry-on bags?
• Once you’re seated, should you be offered something to read? How about a pillow and blanket?
• If you ordered a special meal to accommodate your new, “Strictly Cabbage” diet, should the flight attendant confirm that the meal is onboard and ready for you?

Once you are comfortably settled in your seat (it is comfortable, isn’t it?), the captain announces his appreciation for your business today. After the safety demonstration, you begin reflecting on the service you received today but never really thought about before. Unless, of course, you are in the airline business or fly more than a human should.

Back on the Ground

When you were reading about that little imaginary flight, could you see how many places service standards could come into play? Were you surprised at the many points at which the airline had an opportunity for your “Instant of Absolute Judgment?”

Could you imagine good and bad service performance levels? We’d bet that you’d have no difficulty at all in assessing the ideal level of service you should receive from an airline you fly.

Well, now that you’re all warmed up, let’s discuss creating service standards that can assure your customers receive first class service all the time. We cannot overemphasize the need for consistency here. Every negative “Instant” wipes out one or more positive “Instants.” Standards of service greatly enable you to consistently provide positive experiences.

Implementing Standardized Service

We have shown you how to write a service standard, but there’s quite a gap between having a written standard and putting it to work in your business.

To implement your standards, follow this simple nine-step process (explained in greater detail in the sections that follow):

1. Determine what your customers value.
2. Decide which services to improve.
3. Set measurable standards, and write them down.
4. Make achieving standards part of the culture.
5. Train people to achieve the standards.
6. Measure regularly.
7. Inform employees of your collective progress.
8. Reward success.
9. Reevaluate your standards.

Step 1: Determine What Your Customers Value

It takes a lot of effort to design service standards, train employees to achieve them, make them part of your standard operating procedure, then measure and evaluate performance against those standards. So, you want to be sure that all that time, effort, and trouble is worthwhile.

Ask the following questions:

• What are critical areas where service standards will make a difference to your customers in choosing your business over another?
• What level of service should you provide your customers to create a great service experience?

Here are four factors to consider when choosing tasks to standardize:

1. What your customers tell you they want. Naturally, most people would like to receive a million dollars in value for their hundred-dollar investment. You need to have a clear understanding of what really matters to them in making a buy/no-buy decision, today and the next time. (Chapter 14 goes into detail on effectively surveying your customers.)
2. What your competitors are doing. You shouldn’t do everything your competitors do, but you need to be aware of how they do things. Have their practices impacted customer expectations to the point that you need to respond to them in order to be competitive?
3. Your observations of customer behavior. Customers may not fill out survey forms complaining about the ambiance of your dry-cleaning store, but if you see them wince when they walk in and they’re holding their noses waiting for the clothes to make the journey around the track, take a hint. People may not complain that your french fries are soggy, but if three out of four are throwing them away uneaten, take a hint.

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    At Your Service
   In your business, there may be many service interactions that you take for granted because they’re so routine. Try to see your business through a totally fresh pair of eyes. With the help of some coworkers list every point of contact your business has with a customer. Every interaction is an opportunity to impress a customer positively or negatively. The list you create can form the foundation for your service standards.

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4. The “best practices” of companies outside your industry. Customers form expectations based on every business they deal with—not just by you or your competitors. Stay aware of what state-of-the-art service is. You don’t necessarily have to provide that level, unless your customers insist, but you should try to get close enough so that your performance remains acceptable to your customers who are dealing with many, many vendors in all aspects of their lives. The biggest mistake is paying attention only to what your industry is doing. Innovation comes from looking at ideas outside the vacuum you tend to operate in on a daily basis.

Step 2: Decide Which Services to Improve

Now take the information from step one and do the following:

• Isolate a group of practices in your business that if you improve, your customers will both notice and appreciate.
• Rank those in importance for affecting customer perceptions.
• Assess the readiness of the organization to tackle and support a change in those areas.
• Prioritize the list and determine which services you will improve in the next three, six, nine, and twelve months.

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 Tales from the Real World
When Marriott, which had a good reputation for service, wanted to serve its hotel customers even better, it asked them what was really important to them. Based on the customer feedback, Marriott set new standards. Example: Faster check-ins. Check-in time went from an average of just under three minutes to half that, with 98 percent under two minutes.

 

To achieve that standard, Marriott overhauled its job classification and training systems. The goal: less specialization of people in the lobby for more help at peak times. They developed more well-rounded players through cross-training.

 

When the dust settled, the hotelier needed far fewer people in the lobby, cut overhead costs 40 percent, and improved both employee and customer satisfaction.

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Step 3: Set Measurable Standards, and Write Them Down

Answer the following questions:

• What does desirable performance look like, exactly?
• Can we measure it? How will we know if we achieved it?
• By what process will we measure it?

Then write the standard using the format we showed you in the section “Fill In the Blanks.”

Step 4: Make Achieving Standards Part of the Culture

Next you need to do the following:

• Formally reorganize work to support the standard.
• Create the systems (administrative, technical, managerial) to support achieving the standard.
• Integrate the standards into employee job descriptions.
• Evaluate achievement of the standards as part of an employee’s performance review; reward performance.

Step 5: Train People to Achieve the Standards

Standards mean nothing if the people responsible for delivering them aren’t capable of doing so. Do the following:

• Determine what skills you need to implement the standard.
• Assess what skills are lacking and need to be taught.

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   At Your Service
  Educating employees is not free; just ask those of us who provide such services! At the same time, understand that employee development is not merely a cost center. To the contrary! A better way to think of employee education would be to consider it an investment that pays dividends in greater customer satisfaction, greater sales, and greater profits. The more skilled your employees, the better they can serve your customers and build the kind of loyalty (and resulting profit) that flows from positive customer experiences born of great service.

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• Determine the means by which you’ll teach those skills. (There’s more on training in Chapter 20.)
• Budget time and money for employee education.

Step 6: Measure Regularly

Standards that aren’t measured are nothing more than a wish list. Before you release the standards, let people know that you intend to monitor performance against the standard. Also, determine the method for monitoring. It’s not practical to measure everyone’s performance to standards every day. You’ll need a system for spot checking. Before you publish the standard, be clear about who is going to assess progress. The managers responsible for meeting the standards? A staff person? Outside consultants? How often will you take measurements?

Step 7: Inform Employees of Your Collective Progress

Because the standards are important to your business performance, let employees know how they measure up. To not tell them is like asking people to play in a ball game where the score is a secret. People lose interest in meeting standards when they don’t know how well they’re performing.

In addition to publishing performance-to-standard statistics, show the link to important business indicators such as customers retained, new customers acquired, overall sales, profits, stock price, customer satisfaction scores—whatever helps your frontline understand that their contribution makes a big difference.

Employees must clearly understand the positive impact they will have on the company’s success by implementing the standards. And the negative impact they will have by not implementing the standards. No one wants to feel responsible for being the reason behind a failure.

Step 8: Reward Success

Recognize performance achievement: throw compliments with abandon, throw a party, or even throw money at people. Make some noise, have some fun. Thank people for what they’ve done. Encourage them to keep at it. More motivation ideas appear in Chapter 20.

Step 9: Reevaluate Your Standards

Don’t ever think you’ve finally fine-tuned the business. Just when you get it the way you thought it should be running, your customers will want something else. People’s needs change, their tastes change. Stay in touch with your customers and the market. Never be satisfied. Never stop trying to please.

Can You Standardize “Niceness”?

Let’s briefly go back to your airplane ride. There you are, back in your seat. As you relax— all snug in your warm blanket, head propped up on the nice clean pillow—you close your eyes (but not too long, you can’t read with your eyes closed), and replay all those service interactions detailed earlier.

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 Watch It!
Service standards work when they are paired with training, support, measurement, and reinforcement through rewards. Don’t cheat your organization by just devising and publishing standards. That’s going less than halfway. You won’t achieve your standards. You’ll have wasted your time and made your workforce cynical.

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Evaluate the quality of the experience by thinking about the following questions:

• Were the greetings you received genuinely warm, or did the airline people seem to simply go through the motions?
• If the curbside baggage handlers were not airline employees but contractors instead, did you notice any difference in their level of service? Because in the end, you will either blame or compliment the airline on the service. After all, it was given in their name.
• Did you get the feeling that all the people you dealt with appreciated your business and were genuinely glad you were there that day? Or did you feel like somehow you had interrupted their other, really more important work?
• Did the way the airline people conducted themselves give you confidence? Were you given the impression that these people really knew what they were doing?
• What kind of treatment, based on what you experienced for this ordinary, routine flight, do you think you’d receive from this airline if the plane were delayed for a mechanical problem? Or how about if the flight were cancelled?

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 Watch It!
The most common greeting we all hear in entering a place of business is: Can I Help You! Never, ever, ever, say this line. When Ron hears this, he responds, “I don’t know, can you?” If you don’t know whether or not you can help someone, how should the customer know? Of course you should be able to help the customer. That’s what you are being paid for. Instead, you should be asking “How may I help you?” There really is a difference.

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So much of the impression that customers form about your service comes from how they feel about your individual employees. So, naturally, you want your employees to come across as friendly, likeable, helpful, and knowledgeable. How can you specify a standard for that?

You can standardize behaviors.

Setting Standards for Behavior

While it’s not possible to measure “niceness,” you can specify the behaviors that add-up to being nice. For example:

• Greeting customers. Ever walk into a retail store where no one acknowledged you? Or you couldn’t find help in the store if your life depended on it? Might as well buy by direct mail. A standard could specify, “All customers will be welcomed to our store within a minute of arriving, with a friendly greeting of, ‘Welcome to Our Store! How may I help you today . . .’ ”

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   Watch It!
  While everyone appreciates the personal attention that comes from calling people by name, some prefer you call them Mr. or Ms. So&so rather than by their first name. Calling people by their first name is considered too casual or overly familiar. Better to start more formally. If your customer would rather be addressed as Ms. Rodriguez, don’t risk offending her by calling her Maria.

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• Smiling. Does this require explanation? By putting a smile into your service standards, you make clear just what you mean by words like “friendly demeanor.” (Smile even on the phone. Your customers will see your bright shining face through your words.)
• Using a customer’s name. Dale Carnegie said the sweetest sound in the universe was the sound of your own name. People who use people’s names seem friendlier than those who don’t. So a standard could suggest that service people use a customer’s name as soon as is reasonable in a conversation, and to close every conversation with “thank you, Ms. Customer Name.”
• Escorting customers. Organizations widely acknowledged for their outstanding service like the Ritz Carlton hotel chain and Publix Supermarkets specify that employees give directions to customers with their feet. As in walking. As in, “Let me take you there.”

Why Else Set Standards?

Here are four important reasons why setting standards improves your company:

1. Offers a consistent experience to your customers. They know what to expect from you and so are more likely to keep coming back.
2. Helps you examine how you do your work. Going through the standards setting procedure gives you a great opportunity to reevaluate how you get the work done.
3. Improves employee morale—they know exactly what’s expected from them and can work to achieve it. Everyone likes to know the rules of the game and how to keep score.
4. Guarantees your quality. You cannot have quality without consistent standards. Quality results from consistency over time. It is not a one shot event.