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“We provide solutions.” Sound familiar, this is what our business is based on; what many business are based on, we all provide services. Today, the service sector’s share of the U.S. economy has risen to roughly 80 percent.
Being a service business is complex, complicated and it’s on a continuum; customer’s expectations increase with every good performance. Some experts refer to designing the service function as choreography.
Choreography is the art of designing sequences of movements in which motion, form, or both are specified. Choreography may also refer to the design itself, which is sometimes expressed by means of dance notation. The word choreography literally means “dance-writing” from the Greek.
In operations they have ‘Feasibility” reviews, followed by APQP events (advanced product quality planning) and launch tracking to insure quality.
Is the Service sector different?
Many companies make the mistake of oversellingtheir service–a strategy that backfires when customers are inevitably disappointed. (And a disappointed customer is not a return customer.) United Airlines’ recent animated commercial of a father flying aloft on a bird paints a fairytale fantasy of modern-day air travel. Southwest Airlines has a better approach. The discount king has an ad in which a dorky business traveler at a small-town airport can’t contain his glee at having been upgraded to Business Select. Guess which airline consistently scores higher on consumer satisfaction surveys?
Southwest, because the airline sets its expectations low, it can and does over-deliver.
Bill Hybels is the senior pastor at Willow Creek Church. In a recent article in Fast Company, Hybels and his church, Willow Creek were show cased. Willow Creek has approximately 23,000 attend regular Sunday services. Hybels lectures on Leadership and hosts an annual Leadership Summit. Hybels recently spoke about getting the right people around a table and how this is always a foundational key to success.
In developing the right choreography for a firm, it is critical to have the right people at the table. Executing successful service experiencesrequires all parts of an organization–marketing, operations, sales, finance, and so on. But these silos most often only connect at the top of the organization; they’re not communicating with one another at the consumer level. Successful service design depends upon getting one empowered person from each of these silos in the room. This collaboration cultivates trust and respect within the company, but it also ensures that each silo has a sense of ownership in the project.
Hybels Leadership Summit has included some powerful organizational speakers:
· Ken Blanchard — One Minute Manager
· Jack Welch — former CEO of GE
· Condoleezza Rice — Secretary of State
· Jim Collins — Built to Last
· Patrick Lencioni — The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
· Collin Powell — Head of Joint Chiefs, Secretary of State.
· Tony Dungy — Head Coach in NFL
The theme of this Leadership Summit is service.
Every culture, every service organization needs to set the right expectations and get the right people at the table, these with being fair and flexible will help tune your service organization. Sales, Service teams need choreography, they need rehearsal and notes. Part of every process must be improvement and a flexibility permitting controlled change.
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