Can there be such a thing as a self sustaining service culture?

There are many truths in the commercial world but few more central to observed organisational behaviour than the view that

“What the boss believes is important is important!”

So if the boss believes that something, in this case service quality, is important does that mean that the organisation will automatically achieve standards of excellence in service quality delivery and all their customers will be rendered sockless by their experiences? Unfortunately there is no such guarantee attached to the packaging of a belief but it does mean that the organisation has a much greater chance of success than if the boss treats the issue with an air of supreme indifference.

The very least the boss has to do is tell the people that service quality is important, blindingly obvious you might think but thousands of customer contact staff around the world have never had that fact mentioned to them. You may think staff could work out what the boss is thinking for themselves but remember in an unfocused organisation they have far more serious things to worry about than serving customers, like doing the till, filling in a time sheet properly, checking sell-by dates, getting the tea break schedule right and other vital big business priorities. Another reason why they cannot work it out is that Forrest’s First Law of Communication states that “The Least Developed Human Skill is Clairvoyance” so if the boss has something they want their people to know the secret technique required is to tell them.

However that may still not be enough due to the effect of Forrest’s Second Law of Communication which states that “ The Ability of The Human Animal To Understand is Exceeded Only by Its Ability to Misunderstand”, especially if they put their mind to it! However more on overcoming this and the other performance barriers later, in the meantime it is enough to know that engaging all the people in the organisation is the key factor in building a self sustaining service quality culture.

It has been said that trying to manage an organisational culture is like trying to nail jelly to a wall or herding cats or even trying to teach a squid to square dance.There is no doubt that without helpful models and tools it can appear almost as a black art, a task as full of mystery as it is of challenges.

The most difficult questions arise around understanding the component factors which drive the organisational culture and how service quality itself fits within the myriad of other priorities that have to be managed in order to operate effectively in challenging performance driven markets.

The first step in getting to grips with what can appear to be an amorphous subject is to take a step backwards rather than forwards and to take a look at where service quality sits within the wider organisational cultural landscape.

Organisational culture can be described as “the observable and measurable behavioural outcomes of the sum and priority of its values”

“Values” is a word very widely used in today’s social, commercial and political environments. Yet 100 years ago any dictionary will only provide definitions to do with value in the context of cost or price or with importance in the context of regard for some thing, person or attribute. The interpretation which implies a belief in or a code of practice is a more modern, but never the less very useful, connotation. The history of the taxonomy is however unimportant, what is important is to understand that the term “values” now implies beliefs that are held strongly enough as to influence the way an individual and / or organisation behaves.

An early example of this could be the Quakers who in the general tide of the UK industrial revolution used their beliefs to direct the way they managed their businesses in a way which was fundamentally different from the totally exploitative business models of the time.

So in this context the company culture can be described as “the sum and priority of its values” a belief system that the organisation applies in order to make it successful. The culture can be formally expressed or informally applied. In small businesses where the proprietor is close to the staff the culture is often managed informally, that is to say the staff will get their behaviour clues by observing the owner, or the owner is close enough to the operations to correct any behaviour they feel is inappropriate. In larger organisations this is not possible so the values need to be communicated in a more formal way if the staff are to understand them, adopt them and behave appropriately.

So who decides what the values are to be and what the relative priority of each should be? That decision rests with those who are the leaders of the organisation for it is within this group that the power to drive and manage operational behaviour lies. It is at this level that values sometimes are the subject of disharmony, occurring when the values may be clear to all in the leadership group but their relative priority is not agreed. There is an argument that states that all values are equal. A theory that can work in good times but usually fails the test of reality in difficult operational conditions. It is important to understand values priorities for it can make two organisations with very similar values behave very differently. For the sake of an example, and without going into excruciating academic analysis of what is and is not a value, two organisations that believe in Service Quality and say Maximising Profit are likely to behave differently in Service Quality is prioritised above Maximising Profit in one organisation and the reverse in the other.

So the first step in managing and maintaining a service quality culture across the whole organisation is to understand what the leaders really do believe about service quality, understand what they expect to get from that belief, are clear about its relative importance to the other beliefs they hold and are prepared to commit the resources to deliver their expectations. The following model may be useful in helping to organise thinking in this area and clarify how the process assists the organisation to manage its culture. In many organisations most of the components are in place but are not necessarily utilised in in an integrated way that facilitates the management of the culture.

A Model for Managing Organisational Culture

For the sake of simplicity the model is expressed in a block format. In practice one value may drive any number of expectations and they a number of policies, one policy may direct a number of strategies and one strategy many tactical activities.

Starting from the top of the model a brief explanation of the elements of the model are as follows

Company Description

This should very simply state what the company does and briefly and generally describe its products and services where it provides them and to whom. E.g. XXXXXXX is a retail bank providing a range of lending and saving products to private and business customers. It should avoid any description of how they are provided.

Strategic Intent

This is often variously described and differentiated as vision, mission, purpose however such dissections are less important than to address the central purpose of Strategic Intent which is to state an aspirational description of the destination that the company leaders believe the company can achieve.

Values

As explained above the culture of an organisation is the behavioural output

of the sum and priority of the visible or invisible values (beliefs) of those who have the power to control the way the company behaves.

Expectations

This is the key step in translating strategic intent and culture into day to day action. If values are sincerely believed it is usually because there is some expected outcome or result attached to that belief.

When the expectations of each value are formally developed it is possible to measure the degree to which the organisation is, or is not delivering those expectations. i.e. This is what we expect should be happening and to what degree versus what is actually happening. Thereby these expectations provide the basis for measuring cultural behaviour performance at any given time and the gaps between the expectations and the reality provide the blueprint to develop policies to apply resource to close the gaps. In a large organisation the expected outcomes may vary from division to division or department to department but they can all be anchored in the same values.

Policies

Policies are the enabling mechanisms which provide managers and staff

with the definition, direction and resources to achieve the aims of the organisation. It is a means of formalising the expectations into a qualified and quantified approach.

A clear understanding of the gap between between the expectations and the measured result enables the company to organise and apply resources on the key priorities necessary to close the performance gaps and improve unsatisfactory performance areas. Periodical re-measurement will then show the organisation how effectively their policies are performing.

NB.The 5 P’s Service Quality Management Model which is the performance foundation for The International Customer Service Standard (TICSS) links to this model at this stage.

Strategies

Strategies are the mechanisms used to specify, quantify and direct resources into the broad implementation activities necessary to deliver the aims of the policies.

Tactics

Tactics are the day to day actions which through the guidance of the strategies practically deliver the goods and services and internal development activities the company provides to its internal and external customer bases and to all other stakeholders in the way and to the performance standards the company proposes to provide them.

Customers

The unavoidable truth is that customers are the sole source of revenue for every organisation, it is the role of customers is to provide the company with revenue. It is in the organisation’s greatest self interest to protect its revenue flow and the role and fundamental responsibility of every employee across the whole organisation to keep the customer’s wallet continuously open for business.

Stability and Flexibility

Company Description, Strategic Intent and Values evolve slowly

They are relatively fixed and provide the organisational stability that lets customers and staff and all other stakeholders come to trust the organisation and for what it stands .

Policy Strategy and Tactics may need to change more quickly in response to

market needs and provide organisational flexibility & responsiveness but as they change they can always be anchored in the Values and thereby provide performance consistency.

Engaging the People

Engaging the people in the process is a key element of success. They are the people who work closest to the customers and any usually have the best knowledge of any attendant issues . In that sense it is often true that the best consultants already work for the company. Engaging them in the development and prioritisation of the Expectations can be the exercise that reveals most about the way the organisations prioritises service quality.

The Cross Check

Having identified what the organisation perceives as its prioritised expectations in terms of service quality (and/or the expectations of any of the other values for this process enables a measurement of the complete organisational climate at the same time) it is wise to test these perceptions with customers. Ant number of cross check measures are available form qualitative groups through to online surveys but one which is completely compatible is the new Values Moments methodology which uses a similar expectation based approach to service quality measurement. Differences can then be addressed through policy revision and harmonic similarities reinforced through strategic action.

So this model can be sued to measure the quality of the cultural deliverables and through an on going process on measurement become a part of the day to day business as usual operation of the business and thereby become a self sustaining behaviour in the operation of the business.

Philip Forrest ACII, FCIM, CM, FICSI
The View of the Osprey
President and Co-Founder - The International Customer Service Institute