What should a service industry must do in 21st century to better their services? In my earlier blogs, your heard from me on the examples from an airline industry and a paid television service provider. Now they are my kick-off points to elaborate on differentiating service industries – to develop internal structures that are appropriate for their service culture, segment and the landscape.
Drawing few contrasts are worth to elaborate on identifying the needs from a perspective aligned to the 21st century quirks, quirks that emanate from global connectivity, and, their impact on local cultures in ways that have gone unnoticed hitherto..
Contrasts in services provided:
- Customer is consuming the service in the airline industry example and in the paid television industry example, the customer is consuming a product.
- In the airline industry the service is global in nature and in the paid television industry example the service is local in nature.
- Both services are affected by the service culture practiced internally and with a structure that may or may not be visible or understood by the customers.
- The service teams might have been created as silos to provide the customers with expert advice, but they may also have shortcomings when a single problem that a customer is experiencing spans across several teams. Palming off customers from one team to another, however efficient it may be, will make the service suffer if customers need to repeat everything all over again whether it is for verification for privacy and identity or for the team trying to get a different perspective.
- The teams might have been exhausted either by short staffing to support the intensity of the issues or by the inefficient escalation process or by having to deal with the same issues surfacing across larger section of their customer base rendering the best solutions ineffective, may be due to costs constraints associated with recalls or replacements or resorting to non-automated services to resolve the issues.
- When the service performance appears to or felt by customers as sub-standard, the public opinions casted on social media, user communities and other channels that have global footprints may further harm the mindset of the service teams who are forced to listen to customer rants, yet learn to be patient; may be find team leaders not aligned to the service required, yet have to learn to bear the unintended cracks in the integrity of the service provided.
- When it becomes apparent to the team members that their service culture is turning off customers, they feel their hands tied, yearning to serve, yet have to learn to bear the burden of not crossing the lines for the customers.
How could a service offering be made to stick – no matter what?
- If there exists a learning pedagogy that can advocate service learning, whether it is for the industry or for the resources employed by the service industry, we may have a winner. In a broader sense one could say learning at ‘the point at which rubber meets the road’,
- Learning is usually classified as an experience having several dimensions. Narrowing them down to driving and driven dimensions, the concept of ‘where rubber meets the road’ can be better understood.
- QTIME learning works in several learning dimensions and could be a good starting point to explore. It advocates that the learning needs to start from the ‘driving’ dimensions to cascade the knowledge so acquired to the ‘driven’ dimensions of learning – in a sense can be seen as a ‘where rubber meets the road’ concept.
- QTIME identifies Trust and Innovation acting as driving dimensions to drive Method and Effort dimensions identified as driven dimensions. More at www.qtimelearning.com.
- Within each of these four dimensions, the specific learning quadrants are identified to ensure that the learning is complete – able to develop trust from all corners, and, create pathways for service offerings from an innovation mindset derived from the learnings from Innovation dimension.
- The learning quadrants of the Method dimension are geared towards methods maturity while quadrants from the Effort dimension are geared towards efficiency.
- Combined learning ensures that the learning becomes aligned no matter what the customer base is or the industry sector is or the landscape that has to be dealt with. The sixteen learning quadrants are exhaustive enough to embrace the quirks of 21st century to let the industry survive and continue serving under difficult and unpredictable conditions.
The purpose of QTIME learning is to create QTIMERs who will have skills and capabilities developed from a continuous learning mindset, an essential ingredient to constantly better those services that are to be offered across diverse service cultures, customer segments and the service landscape.