Monday 5 October 2015

The essential Link between Generosity and Service Quality

Generosity. its effect on organisational process!

Generosity goes hand-in-hand with Positivity. That is why I insist managers to train themselves to inculcate generosity among themselves and their team members.  In these days of  "Cost-squeeze-to-Profitability" the general organisation drive is towards negative values.  On can experience the pain of negative thrust everytime you stand up to complain or claim your rightful service from a business.  I would like to narrate an incident that prompted this post.

A Service Failure & Potential Remedy

My whole morning today was spent on a battle with ACT Fibernet team. First they refused to believe that I was not receiving the 40Mb/s speed I had subscribed for. After I persisted with my aggressive complaining streak across, call centre, Twitter, Facebook and mobile phone call to the sales person who sold the connection, things started moving. The following happened-
1.  A very nice person, +ACT FIBERNET Field Engineer landed in my place
2. He convinced the people in the back end that I am indeed not receiving the promised 40Mb/s.
3. He took a picture of the speed test result and sent it by Whatsap to his boss
3. Thereafter, there was a software downloaded to co-browse and eliminate local issues
4. This was followed by cables being checked
5. Finally they recognised that the problem was universal and and not local to me
6. That lead to the technical team in their head-office addressing the issue and restoring the speed I am supposed to receive as per my subscription

Organisational Negativism

Now I come to the root of the problem, "ORGANISATIONAL NEGATIVISM".  By inference Managers have been trained to question the existence of a problem.  When a problem is raised, the onus for establishing the existence of a problem is on the lesser mortals in the food chain, thus the back end teams are on a high horse and they refuse to believe that the customer is telling the truth, then they refuse to believe that the field engineer is telling the truth.
If the aggrieved party is able to convince the powers that hold the key to the solution by proving that the customer and everyone else in the chain is indeed telling the TRUTH, the problem is fixed in a jiffy. 

ORGANISATIONAL NEGATIVISM is not a problem only with +ACT FIBERNET . This is a universal problem with most large "silo" centric organisations. The remedy is in the hands of the Senior Management team, who can establish an effective governance mechanism to weed out organisational lethargy and establish Speed-of-Service!

Organisational lethargy and hiding behind cost constraints or resource constraints are often the enemies of Service Excellence.  Oganisations desirous of chasing service excellence need to identify the common excuses and quickly put an end to it.  

Successful customer franchises have flourished and even commanded premium just by staying focused on Delivering the promise.  While being Customer focused in generative, running to the other side of the spectrum and getting Cost Focused in simply degenerative. 

I will urge my leadership team to stay generous and stay Customer Focused  ... profitability is simply an effect!

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