Discuss the process of improving customer service in order to ensure consistent excellent customer service.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The purpose of service process design is to provide excellent customer service.
To provide excellent customer service, one must
1. Understand and meet customer expectations.
2. Provide fail-safe services (poka yokes).
3. Provide service guarantees.
4. Measure your performance relative to customer expectations.
5. Manage customer complaints.
6. Recover from service failures.
The concept of meeting needs is associated with value, and the concept of meeting expectations is associated with quality.
The Japanese term poka yoke refers to a fail-proof mechanism, or method, for preventing quality failures in manufacturing. In service systems that involve customers, poka yokes can be used to prevent customer failures. The idea behind service poka yokes is to provide a simple mechanism to prevent or reduce the possibility of customer error.
Another way to reduce errors is to provide service guarantees. Service guarantees, especially so-called unconditional service guarantees, may be considered a marketing tool, but they can have even bigger effects on assuring service quality by focusing employee attention on reducing or eliminating the causes of errors.
Measuring service performance is much more difficult than measuring manufacturing performance due to the involvement of customers in the production system. Each customer may present different needs, provide different input resources, and have different expectations for the results.
Because customer happiness can be elusive and hard won, complaint resolution is an important component of a quality management system.
And finally, service recovery efforts demonstrate how firms respond to service failures, which is important in developing customer loyalty.