Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Customer Centering: The New Quality Imperative
There is nothing so frightening as ignorance in action.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
Most of the service-quality programs now underway in organizations are doomed to fail.
This is, in a way, an optimistic viewpoint, not a pessimistic one. It doesn't suggest that the goal is impossible, only that most organizations are taking the wrong road in trying to get there. Sometimes a painful failure is a necessary prelude to success.
Over the past eight years, I have had the opportunity to work with and study hundreds of organizations embarked on the quest for "quality." These have been organizations from almost every conceivable industry, of all sizes, and with many differing styles of doing business. They have made many different kinds of attempts to find the holy grail of outstanding service quality.
I have seen more failure than success, more frustration than satisfaction, more agony than joy. The road to the promised land of superior service is strewn with the wreckage of ambitious programs with inspiring names and vaguely specified goals.
One organization after another has launched its authentic "this time it's for real," "this time we really mean it," "the customer is king," "service is our business" program, only to see it lurch along down the road for a few months or years and then the wheels come off. There is, unfortunately, more failure than success to report.
Most organizations areapplying twentieth-century thinking and solutions to twenty-first-century problems. The difficulty is one of mind set, not method; the problem is cognitive, not cosmetic. When you start with wrong assumptions and apply crooked reasoning, it's hard to arrive at good conclusions.
The eighties was the decade of customer consciousness. It was the "wake-up call," letting businesses know they could no longer take customers for granted. Yet the thinking of the eighties brought little in the way of fundamentally new approaches Or breakaway concepts for winning and keeping customers.
Books like In Search of Excellence and others following in its wake caused a deep stirring in the corporate psyche, but little significant rethinking of business precepts. Business books became fashionable, but it was basically business as usual. We were shown some admirable role models, but we were given precious little prescriptive guidance about how to do it.
Service America!: Doing Business in the New Economy sounded the clarion call in 1985 for the American Service Revolution, and the book's wide international acceptance signaled a similar readiness in other countries for a new view of the business of service.
Yet, for the most part, the eighties was the decade of talking and experimenting. It was a period of consciousness raising and brave declarations. Many organizations attacked what turned out to be a wholly unfamiliar problem by using reflexive solutions left over from a bygone era of manufacturing and industrialized thinking.
But it's now the decade of the nineties, and the twenty-first century is in sight. It is time to look back at the experience of the eighties and learn some hard lessons. We need to start with a clean canvas, paint a picture of the successful service/quality organization of the twenty-first century, and see how to use the best practices of today's outstanding service organizations around the world in creating the new reality.
There must be a fundamental revision in our way of thinking about customers, about service, about leadership and management, and about the culture of organizations if we are to build and maintain the kind of competitive customer-winning capability that will be able to survive and thrive into the twenty-first century. That change in thinking will take the form of a basic relearning of most of what we know about those subjects, and a reconceptualization of that knowledge. The following story gives an example of a situation where this new thinking was needed, yet wasn't available.
Anne-Marie Goes To The Bank: A Quality Parable
I have a friend, named Anne-Marie, who lives in Australia. She does business with one of Australia's biggest banks. Relating an experience she had best serves to summarize the convoluted thinking that has brought the banking industry to its present state of confusion and lack of direction. But in a much broader sense, it symbolizes some of the fundamental changes in management thinking that must take place in all industries.
Act One:
Anne-Marie got a letter from the bank telling her that her savings account was inactive, hadn't had any chargeable transactions in several months, and had too low a balance. If she didn't deposit more money, the letter said, the bank was going to deduct five dollars from her balance, which was about twenty dollars at the time.
She was a bit dismayed by this news, but decided to comply with the bank's demands. So she and her mother took her piggy bank (Anne-Marie was eight years old) and went off to the local branch of the bank to make a deposit.
They stood in line, waiting their turn, and finally presented their deposit to the teller. The exasperated teller didn't want to spend time counting the coins in the piggy bank, so they agreed to leave it there and pick it up later.
A few days later, Anne-Marie got another letter from the computer, announcing that it had just deducted five dollars from her account. Outraged, she and her mother paid another visit to the bank, only to learn that the clerk had misplaced the piggy bank and the deposit was never made. The bank had confiscated 25 percent of her net worth.
Only Thing That Matters. Copyright © by Karl Albrecht. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
