Business Operations

By Mike Leigh

Executive Summary:

Determining the level of service you provide is important.

Send your questions or comments to Mike@ OpXSolutionsllc.com

May I be of service?

During the pandemic, I was one of the few people who continued to travel. It was amazingly efficient! No lines. Quick boarding. Lots of open seats on the plane. And no one was entering my hotel room each day.

To reduce the risk of spreading the virus, hotels stopped entering hotel rooms for daily cleaning. I didn’t miss it, and apparently many others didn’t either. Today, many hotels have greatly reduced this service unless you ask for it.

There is an important lesson here for service industries. How do you determine the level of service to provide? Should hotels provide daily cleaning? Should they continue to make a pretty tissue box flower and fold the end of the toilet paper roll into a neat triangle in the bathroom?

In short, the level and quality of service an organization provides should primarily be defined by the customers. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Many service organizations, especially smaller ones, define their service standards by what the owner and managers believe is best instead of what the customer wants and values. This can cause two problems.

First, the services may be insufficient. Consider the airline industry. Does anyone consider flying to be enjoyable and hassle-free? Baggage fees, front-to-back boarding sequence, no leg room, and high prices are not what I value. Insufficient services create unhappy customers.

Second, the services may exceed what the customer values. Case in point is hotel room cleaning. It appears that the new normal for hotels will be less frequent room cleaning. Because of pandemic precautions, the hotel industry discovered that few guest really want or need the daily cleaning. Why is too much service a problem? Because it’s wasteful and adds unnecessary costs to the company. In the field of process improvement, this is called overprocessing.

It’s critical for all organizations to understand what their customers value and to set clear standards for service outcomes. Too little service causes dissatisfaction. Too much service adds cost and reduces profit. When service standards are not clear, front-line team members must figure it out themselves, leading to mistakes.

Do you know what your clients value?