Going Undercover to Size Up Service
The
Financial Post, Wednesday, September 21, 1994. Randall Scotland
The fashionable talk in management circles is all about getting
close to the customer by improving service.
Indeed, many companies, especially those in highly competitive
sectors, emphasize their customer-first policies. But to ensure
the commitment is more than lip service, retraining is often required
to motivate the rank and file.
The trick is to do that while keeping a lid on costs. Customer
satisfaction is important, but so is the bottom line. Spending hard
dollars on training programs and perhaps beefing up staff to meet
the mandate for better service, can be expensive in times of restraint.
That’s particularly true for companies that have downsized.
Some have found they may have cut too deeply.
“In some cases, they’ve had to hire back, maybe on
contract, some of the people they let go,” said Barry Cook,
Vancouver managing partner of Western Management Consultants.
They have little choice but to do so. In some quarters, notably
retailing, the arrival of aggressive U.S rivals in intensifying
the need to up the service ante to remain viable.
But it is one thing to say service is a priority, quite another
to prove it is working. The need to audit performance is becoming
a growth industry.
To satisfy the demand for measurable results, more and more companies
are using comment cards, satisfaction surveys and 1-800 telephone
numbers to solicit customer feedback. Others rely on evaluations
from outside consultants to sleuth out the truth.
One such firm is Mystery Shoppers Inc. of Oakville, Ont. As the
name implies, the company goes undercover to test, among other things,
how well workers uphold their employers’ standards.
Once the findings are in, management uses the information to take
remedial action – and to reward outstanding employees.
“A lot of my clients have award systems built into the evaluations
process,” said Nicholas Samson, president of Mystery Shoppers.
“If they reach a certain score they get different types of
awards, either pins or vouchers or dinners. Even money.”
The need for service audits is growing because companies have to
know how effectively employees understand and use their training,
said David Lipton, president of another sleuthing firm, Sensors
Quality Management Inc. of Toronto.
“[Companies] send them out into the trenches and they might
get the odd bit of [new] training once a year, or once every five
years, or whenever the budget allows.
“But they’re not being watched how closely they’re
coming to those standards or criteria they were originally taught.”
The audits can uncover some surprised, Lipton added.
Say a hotel wanted to compare its phone reservation system with
the competition. If an audit shows that operators are answering
calls within three rings, while a rival takes five or more, management
could justify reallocating some reservation staff.
The service level would remain competitive and other departments
would benefit from extra employees.
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