SHARE:
Secrets of Service
In response, Messing assembled the hospital's Continuous Improvement Coordinating Committee, which quickly named a 30-member Transcultural Enhancement Team. Within weeks the team had devised and implemented a list of Hispanic-friendly initiatives. Among them: bilingual voice mail for outside callers, bilingual clinical brochures, additional translators in each department and additional Latin dishes on the hospital menu. Ongoing research tracked the success of each initiative. "If you're truly committed to good customer service," says Messing, "you've got to know exactly where you are and be ready to move the instant you detect a problem." Today, Hispanic customer loyalty at Baptist is at an all-time high.
Meet Florida's new breed of service companies - fast, nimble, innovative and, above all, obsessed with what the customer thinks. They are hospitals and hotels, credit card companies and cruise lines. While others talk endlessly of TQM (total quality management) and dream of being customer-driven, the service elite are pulling away from the pack by putting these lessons into daily practice. Indeed, within a rising sea of consumer despair, they stand out for their unyielding commitment to service excellence. "The possibilities are endless when a company starts to view service as a competitive advantage, as an asset to be managed," says Jim Selzer of AT&T Universal Card Services in Jacksonville, a recent winner of both the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the Florida Governor's Sterling Award. "Unfortunately, most companies still simply view service as a cost of doing business."
While few managers will disagree with Selzer's sad assessment, only a handful have taken the message to heart. Customers across the state increasingly complain of rude hospitality workers, misinformed sales reps, and misplaced mail orders. Despite paying heavy lip service to customer needs - with mottoes, credos, worker pledges and corporate mission statements - most Florida companies fall far short of consumer expectations. "There's no question that overall service levels are on the decline," says Barton Weitz, chairman of the marketing department and a customer service specialist at the University of Florida. "It's very expensive to provide good service and many companies aren't convinced that it's worth the expense." Florida is not alone. Over the past three years the American Society for Quality Control has tracked a nationwide decline in customer satisfaction. Compiling consumer data from more than two dozen service, manufacturing and public-sector industries, researchers say U.S. companies continually fall short of customer expectations, and yet many appear oblivious or indifferent to the findings. The chief causes: failure to promote a culture of service excellence within the company, failure to systematically measure customer attitudes and preferences, and failure to respond innovatively to increased competition and rising customer expectations. To be fair, experts say, the customer service playing field has changed dramatically. Not too long ago many service industries were dominated by neighborhood mom-and-pop shops where good service meant knowing your customers' names and preferences. But with the growth of high-volume, national franchises within the service sector - from banks to dry cleaners to shoe stores - many service providers lost both the ability and incentive to remain intimate with their customers: Minimum wage sales clerks rarely value a happy customer as highly as do owner-operators.
Shortsighted managers compounded the problem by often overlooking the correlation between good customer service and financial results. Indeed, corporate belt-tightening has historically spelled reduced service levels, impacting consumers by way of fewer sales representatives to answer phones, extra charges for alterations or gift wrapping, or service workers with inadequate training. "Particularly for larger companies, providing good service can be a very expensive proposition," says Weitz. "And many [managers] aren't convinced that their customers are willing to pay for it."
But consumers must also share the blame. In some industries - most notably retailing - consumers have displayed a willingness to trade good service for lower prices. Even among the affluent, service experts say, price may be a sole predictor of consumer behavior. "Some consumers simply have not protested [declines in service]," says Herbert Leeds, a retailing consultant based in Miami. "They're willing to be treated like cattle as long as they are offered low prices." Leeds says the price-over-service phenomenon, which is more pronounced in Florida than in most other states, has left many managers wondering how best to balance consumer demands. By some accounts, Florida's multi-ethnic, highly transient labor base doesn't help matters. Managers, particularly in the food service and hospitality industries, routinely decry the dearth of workers for low-end service jobs. One Miami restaurateur says the bane of the business is the constant search for bright, smiling, educated people who will wait tables. Many jobs require bilingual skills. "We're stuck with what we get, so no wonder service can be poor," he says. But not everyone buys the excuse. Chase Burritt, national director for hospitality services at Ernst & Young LLP, says hotel and restaurant managers shouldn't expect much when they offer low pay, no benefits and little job security. He says companies that create added worker incentives - tangible or intangible - have little trouble finding quality people. Some managers agree. "If you provide a positive work experience for your employees, you'll have the pick of the litter," insists Bob Basham, president and chief operating officer of Outback Steakhouse in Tampa, a service-oriented chain with one of the lowest employee turnover rates in the industry. Outback, with 332 restaurants in 36 states, has a lower waiter-to-table ratio than most competitors, training programs that encourage employee promotion and motivational events such as pizza parties, canoe trips and midnight bowling expeditions that cultivate team spirit.
Jorge Gonzalez, General Manager of the Ritz-Carlton, Naples, agrees that Florida's ethically diverse work force is a challenge but not a setback. He says companies can instill pride and dignity in workers, whoever they are, by empowering them. At the Ritz-Carlton, employees of each department - such as room service, housekeeping, front desk - are assigned to self-managing work teams. Each team is responsible for scheduling, payroll, peer review, hiring and firing and other tasks normally entrusted to management. "If you want to provide quality service, you've got to keep your people satisfied," says Gonzalez, whose hotel was recently named the fifth best resort in the world by readers of Cond? Nast Traveler magazine. "The best way to accomplish that is by creating a culture in which everyone feels they are part of something much larger, and something much more important than just the job that they do."
Creating that sense of higher purpose within its ranks has helped the Walt Disney Company of Lake Buena Vista build a service culture perhaps unrivaled within American business. Throughout orientation, new employees - from senior executives down to part-time hotel clerks - hear more about the Disney "heritage" and the company's "tradition of excellence" than they do about their job responsibilities. Training programs take on an air of a show business rehearsal during which employees (Disney calls them all "cast members") come to believe that the company's success depends on the coordinated efforts of the entire Disney team - all 42,000 of them. Employees are routinely queried for ways to improve companywide efficiency. "The goal is to get our cast members connected to the larger meaning of Disney and not just to the specific role they are out there fulfilling," says Jayne Parker, who heads Disney's employee training program. "We want them to feel as though their efforts and their input will make a real difference for our organization." Through Disney University (which is what the company calls its employee training arm) professional development seminars now help other businesses design and implement their own Disney-style employee training programs.
To be sure, Disney takes service to a very elevated level, but creating a culture that stresses service, say most experts, is a requisite for reaching the ranks of the most successful companies. But the task is formidable. "Clearly, the companies with a built-in service culture will have an advantage," says the University of Florida's Weitz. "What's difficult is for an older company - with people who have been doing things the same way for 10 or 20 years - to reinvent itself with this kind of emphasis on service."
The effort may have backfired on Fort Lauderdale-based Hyde Park Market. A year ago, the 17-store South Florida supermarket chain hoped to impress customers with a newly announced commitment to service excellence by pinning five-dollar bills to the shirts of check-out clerks. If the clerk failed to greet the customer, a sign announced, the customers could claim the money, which later was docked from the clerk's pay. Some customers were offended by the gimmick, and many employees were furious. "I can't remember the last time my boss greeted me," said one clerk following the short-lived campaign. "If they want us to smile and be friendly, maybe they should start by practicing what they preach." Weitz agrees: "You can't force a culture. It has to come from the top down."
One company that did reinvent itself is Jacksonville's Mike Shad Ford. Five years ago, the company, like many others, fell prey to the seductive promise of Total Quality Management. "In the beginning we didn't use the words ?quality' or ?service,'" recalls Mike Shad, president and owner of the 200-person auto dealer. "We just started talking about the importance of the customer. Everything was about pleasing the customer." Shad drafted a mission statement - "We build caring, trusting, lifelong relationships between ourselves and our customers, providing for our mutual success." - and posted a list of five company values, along with six "guiding principles" of business. Shad also created 13 "cross-functional" worker teams - composed of representatives from each company department - to recommend improvements in key service functions. One worker team, for example, designed an express check-out program that allows service customers to pay in advance and then pick up their car at the end of the day without waiting to see a cashier.
Over time, Shad says, employees uncomfortable with the customer-first approach moved on; others, attracted by its growing reputation for quality service, were brought in. "It takes time to create this kind of a culture," says Shad. "The bottom line is that we all have to truly believe in what we're doing. Otherwise it's just a waste of time." Mike Shad Ford ranks in the top one percent of the nation's Ford dealers in vehicle sales. Earlier this year the company became the first auto dealer to receive the Governor's Sterling Award for total quality management.
Shad attributes much of his company's success to an ongoing, comprehensive customer research program. Customer feedback reveals service lapses, problem employees and emerging consumer preferences. Unfortunately, the lesson may be lost on many other managers. Some experts lay the blame for America's service malaise on antiquated accounting and managerial theories, many of which are still rooted in our Industrial Age past: "It's a whole lot easier to count widgets than it is to ask how well your customer is satisfied," says Barbara Everitt Bryant, a research scientist with the National Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan Business School. Bryant says service measurement is an overlooked science in corporate America. Predictably, she explains, companies with poor service records find no use for service measurement tools, while companies with strong service cultures can't get enough of them. Such is the case with AT&T Universal Card Services, whose visitors are boldly greeted with the company's raison d'etre in the front lobby wall of its Jacksonville headquarters: "Customers are the center of our universe." Selzer, the company's senior vice president for customer services, says researchers track more than 100 internal and external service-related indicators, such as how long it takes to answer a call, accuracy of transactions and the amount of computer downtime. Bonuses are tied to reaching service goals for each indicator, which are updated daily and posted on wall charts. "To build an organization that values service you first proclaim what you're all about," says Selzer, "and then you build a set of measurements that focus on every possible way in which you touch your customers." Companies that understand their customers (and their own strengths and weaknesses in serving them) not only correct mistakes but also move deftly when opportunities arise. Tech Data Corporation, the Clearwater-based distributor of personal computer products, uses regular customer focus groups to direct new service offerings. For example, when customers began asking about online purchasing, the company quickly installed a system now recognized as the industry's finest. Sales on the Internet are growing 10% to 12% a month. As a service to resellers, who buy from Tech Data, it has created a program to ship products directly to the resellers' customers, using the resellers' own invoices and packing labels. "A lot of companies ask their customers what they want," says Larry J. Armold, Tech Data's vice president of customer and technical service, "but the successful ones do something about it, quickly, before their competitors do."
That's been the philosophy of Northern Trust Bank of Florida. Miami-based Northern Trust has garnered an unrivaled reputation for service obsession by hosting clients at "no-pitch" private dinners, by sponsoring literary societies and other high-brow community groups, and by creating a breakfast and lunch series for clients, featuring such speakers as Mark Russell, Ted Turner and David Brinkley. Ray Marchman, Northern Trust's senior vice president for marketing, strategic planning and expansion, says service innovations such as these allow them to expand their business base while maintaining the client intimacy they're known for. "Hopefully your business will grow, but so will customers' expectations," he says. "So maintaining a high level of service becomes like managing a harem after living for years with only one wife. With only one, you can spend a lot of time with her, but when you have 50, it suddenly becomes very difficult to give them the close personal attention they deserve. In many ways, continually pleasing your customers poses a similar challenge."
The service initiatives of Northern Trust, Tech Data and other top companies should not go unnoticed by managers across Florida. Many experts agree that the failure of companies to borrow and adapt service innovations from outside their own industries contributes to the overall decline of customer satisfaction. In an age of online purchasing, electronic banking and worldwide overnight package delivery, customers wonder why they can't pick up the phone and speak with an operator at their neighborhood department store. "Service standards are always relative to what someone is already doing," says Paul Wilson, executive director of service excellence at AT&T American Transtech, another Jacksonville-based AT&T subsidiary and itself a recent Governor's Sterling Award winner. "And I suspect these standards are now jumping across industry boundaries, raising the expectations of consumers everywhere."
Wilson, whose company receives and processes customer complaints and "1-800" help calls made to large corporations, says managers who still equate good customer service with a smiling receptionist will be hard pressed to compete once the service bar is raised to even greater heights.
