During one of our seminars this week we discussed customer service and customer satisfaction as a strategic objective and specifically what we, as managers, could do to lift satisfaction. Service as a core strategy can be quite powerful. As proof, Herb Kelleher, CEO of the remarkable and profitable Southwest Airlines considers his company to be in the customer service business rather than the airline business.
As we discussed making organizations accountable for service excellence, a financial services executive suggested measuring customer satisfaction. All nodded in agreement and next we debated the effort and length of time required to create an effective customer satisfaction survey. The group's consensus: six to nine months to fully test and deploy a functioning satisfaction monitoring survey for a sizable organization.
I asked whether sending the survey would impact daily service activities. They concluded it might, but not directly. Organizations spend months measuring service without ever defining what specifically needs to change in the daily activities of those delivering service to customers.
Pseudo-Work
We have become accustomed to considering measurement as real work, when measurement (as suggested by Peter F. Drucker and others) was intended to track real work's value.
In reality, measuring is not work - it is pseudo-work. An organization with 900 monthly measurements would not be more profitable than another with 80 monthly measures.
Change First - Measure Later
I told the group how our company worked with a busy IT client to improve service satisfaction quickly and, most important, perceptibly. We suggesting specific changes to a few strategic, daily activities and told employees they'd be accountable for changing their daily activities accordingly. The service level went up immediately prompting a "What happened to IT? They care now," comment from a facility administrator which the IT group served. We felt it more important to, first, change the level of customer service prior to measuring the level of customer service. Now the client has a survey but still must be careful to actually make visible changes as a result of the survey responses.
Value Measurement More Highly Than Real Work
Historically, managers in most organizations made specific changes and then looked for a way to gauge impact. Now, we value the measurement of important issues more highly than the actual changing of the daily activities involved. This pattern of management behavior is a reaction to senior management fixation with numbers and their inattention to the actual activities involved. It is now routine in many organizations to merely identify an opportunity, install data collection and measurement policies, and never discuss what people should do differently to effect the change in question.
Mentors Point Out What Needs to Change
This practice hollows out managers who now see their roles as adjudicators rather than mentors.
Isn't the role of a mentor to observe ongoing behavior and make specific recommendations on what you could do differently to achieve a better outcome?
Again let's look to Herb Kelleher as he discusses Southwest's strategy, "We have a `strategic' plan. It's called `doing things'."
Reset Required
It's high time we reset management and changed both the sequence and the associated value of doing things vs. measuring things.
