Clients

Customer Service Excellence 

The word "excellence" has been around in the world of customer care for as long as I can remember. Together with the words "customer" and "service" the phrase conjures up a picture of a fired up organization serving its customers in a truly excellent way. I guess you could say this is my personal definition.

More recently governments and the public sector (particularly in the United Kingdom) have latched onto the term and are using it to define a specific program to raise customer service standards.

In their own words, the UK Government wants the public sector to provide customer support in an efficient, excellent, equitable and empowering manner.

Ultimately, they say their aim is to put the country's citizens at the heart of every public service organization.

Excellent customer service is essential in today's competitive economy. Businesses that want to compete, survive and prosper must return to the priority of excellent customer service

Service Excellence Defined (and Illustrated)

Service excellence can be hard to define — it often falls into the “know it when I see it” category of vague, but important distinctions.  Part of the challenge is the subjectivity of a word like excellence. Not all customers value service attributes in the same way. The intimacy you enjoy with a waiter who asks about your children and remembers how you like your burger may feel intrusive and jarring to me (hypothetically, of course).

I’d like to ground the definition of service excellence in the idea of reliability.  Service excellence is the consistent delivery of a high value/price experience, day after day, year after year, regardless of who happens to be on the front lines of the delivery process. It is the systematic output of a service model that is designed explicitly to produce it.  It is not the typical way we consume good service today, which is when entrepreneurial employees take it upon themselves to meet our needs in spite of the system.

In the spirit of know-it-when-I-see-it, I’m starting a highly subjective, incomplete list of service organizations that have reliably offered me (or people I know) excellent service.  I hope this brings the concept to life a bit. I also hope to learn from you. I would love to hear about other organizations you’d add to this list.