Monday, July 2, 2012

Does Service Really Matter? Reflections #1

Reflecting on the case study of Vegetable vendor and the Platinum customer, we see that how specialization & standardization can make the customer irrelevant. Especially in today’s global world where growth is the mantra of the day, as organizations scale up their operations, it is assumed that standard processes and team of specialists can run the operations like a factory. In large business operations like retail, telecom service, health care service etc, the customer is treated like a part entering the assembly line that is subject to system of controls & processes. As the customer comes out of this assembly line, what he wanted and what he gets is irrelevant to business, what is important to the customer executive is the process; the customer behind the machine or the process is not seen. What is the need for the vegetable vendor to jump out and get something for the customer even if it is not available in his shop? When the customer executive’s job is only to complete the transaction and strictly adhere to the processes, they don’t see the human being inside the customer unlike the vegetable vendor. If the customer executive is rewarded for the target numbers he achieves, obviously there is no motivation for Value Creation.

If we train & educate our service professionals to work on a plane, hard ground of assembly lines and equip them to follow instructions & processes and then reward/penalize them based on the target numbers, how do we expect them to work in swampy, lowland? The reality is swampy, lowland where things don’t always work as written in theory books or process manuals. Like the vegetable vendor, one needs to jump out, not necessarily to the next shop but at least to understand what customers want. In the case of platinum customer, we saw that the customer found his own solution to solve the billing problem.
The model of Technical Rationality –the view of the professional knowledge has most powerfully shaped our thinking about professions and to work with rigor in a plane, hard ground. From the perspective of Technical Rationality, professional practice is a process of problem solving and the professionals are trained to solve problems of choice or decision through the selection, from available means, of the one best suited to established ends. Technical rationality depends on the agreement about the ends. When ends are fixed and clear, then the decision to act can present itself as the instrumental problem. But when ends are confused and conflicting, there is yet no problem to solve. This is the dilemma in our rigor of processes & metrics versus the relevance of unique customer situations. Our training and education system ignore the key aspect of service management, value creation and innovation. We are equipped to work only in high, hard land, on assembly lines where both means and ends are defined; we are programmed to just follow the instructions to work in the mode of input-defined process-output.  

Every organization needs standardization at some point and the quality systems, policies and procedures become part of the system. The key for success here is, how do we still keep alive the passion and commitment of the vegetable vendor and how we keep the capabilities connected with reality. If the customer executives are trained to follow the process, use only the scripts, and if the Manager’s performance is assessed only based on the numbers like growth, volume, speed, efficiency etc, it’s a tough call to focus equally on value creation & customer satisfaction.

The objective of building capabilities, acquiring deep knowledge & specialization is to solve customer problems or design solutions to meet their needs. But if specialization builds silos that are operating only in their domain with no regard for customer needs, it defeats the business purpose. When the process capabilities fail to connect with real operations issues like escalations, project transitions etc it becomes a constraint to service delivery. People & Process capabilities need to have adaptable capacity to work on swampy, low ground; specialization & standardization designed for plane, hard ground are deterrents for service excellence and business growth. If concepts refer to facts, then knowledge has a base in reality but if concepts are cut off from reality, then so is all human knowledge and our actions are going to be helplessly blind.

Theory & concepts are not made only for ideal conditions. The Service Leader should look at every problem situation or opportunity as unique and use the concepts only to educate the mind, to see deeply, and not force fit the theory. He/She should train & prepare the Manager’s and their team to focus both on process & value creation. Theory and Practice both are important and any extreme position will yield bad results, reflecting on theory and experience is the key for transformation. The Reflective Practitioner doesn’t see the deductive thinking process as the end in itself, rather they bring life to it by integrating the inductive process to evaluate the situations and recognize the gaps between vision & reality, theory & practice. The Service Leader as a Reflective Practitioner loops back the edges of contradictions, conflicts, complexities & uncertainties and moves from specific application to general concepts through the inductive process to bridge the gaps.

Copyright Sunil P Rangreji

No comments:

Post a Comment