To Win The Service Battle...You Must First Declare War!

When a nation goes to war for a legitimate and worthy cause, it is natural for the people of that nation to become unified and focused on achieving victory. And as well as their external focus on ‘winning’, the nation’s populace will display a sense of urgency about maximising their own working contributions and the productivity of ‘other teams’ to assist the war effort, and they will be undeterred and undivided by petty problems and daily distractions.

This kind of external focus, unified effort, commitment and teamwork rarely happens in the majority of business organizations. The primary cause is that companies have yet to make a declaration of war, so to speak, in relation to the special service they can offer to the markets they serve. Vision and mission statements do not constitute the kind of declaration needed, mainly because they are general and not specific, and besides the majority of ‘statements’ have a sameness about them that is frightening. And most ‘statements’ have not received the support of customers, and are not subject to market accountability through customer feedback.

The business equivalent of a declaration of war is a ‘service promise’ that offers true and distinctive value to customers, and which everyone inside the serving organization believes in, contributes to and helps to deliver! These are the 4 steps that must be taken to create a strong service promise:

• Management needs to be ‘connected’ to the markets it serves, through a lasting association with progressive customers. The best way I know is to create a ‘board of customers’, consisting of perhaps 10 prospects and customers of varying sizes that are committed to high business standards and consistent sales and profit growth. The board idea would involve four meetings each year, each for about one day, and the key discussion points would be their views on your service, marketing and sales contributions, plus a review of their performance in areas that involve your product or service. Only through this form of ‘attachment’ can you begin to see how to improve current operations and enlarge your service value in the future. The ongoing nature of the board meetings will ensure that management becomes accountable for external service, and not just for internal sales and profits. The ‘board’ will act as a window to the entire market, and will provide far more substance than any form of ‘focus groups’.

• In association with the board of customers and your own management team, construct a service promise that offers to successfully ‘manage’ the business you conduct today with customers, and which clearly contributes to tomorrow’s business development needs of customers. If the board is involved in this critical process, to whatever extent you feel is appropriate, then they will be the first to advise you if your two service contributions fall short of the ‘promise’.

• Advise and sell the internal divisional teams on the nature of the company’s external service promise, and invite each team to separately and privately create plans for how they will accomplish two goals: one is to help make the company’s service promise a reality, and two is how they will better serve each other as teams. You can then approve or help modify the plans and highlight each team’s commitment to the service promise, and keep secret each team’s own service promise to other divisional teams.

• Through the board of customers and as many other customers as it takes, measure the external progress of the service promise, and the internal progress in results. Communicate with management and staff on progress in both areas and organise improvements where necessary.

Those who win service battles are strong in purpose and unified in effort, to the point of using customers as allies and management and staff as serious contributors to victory!





To Win The Service Battle...You Must First Declare War! - To learn more about this author, visit John Lees's Website.

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