What does good service look like in The UK today?

In general terms it doesn’t matter what industry you work in, service levels have been the subject of intense scrutiny as an area of strategic improvement for a considerable time. The British economy has been evolving over the past 50 years, moving away from reliance on primary and secondary industries and the provision of high quality services are more important than ever before. So in this Competitive domestic environment, what does good service look like today?

With a visit from a Czech friend over the new year break, one thing struck him about Britain which from the inside I had never noticed. When you are at a super market and you have paid, the check-out staff will wait for you to finish packing your bags before dealing with the next customer. Apparently, this is far from the norm in the Czech Republic and a very British example of every day service improvement. It’s a tiny detail that improves the shopping experience, even after payment, which will subconsciously bring return business back to the supermarket in the future.

With service levels constantly improving around you, what is your business doing to keep up and how can we improve on such a high standard?

Well the first point to understand about service levels is, if left unmaintained, they will naturally decline. The nature of motivation and complacency means that your 5-star service will slip to 4-star within weeks if they are not the subject of the kind of scrutiny you’ve been carrying out previously.

So it’s clear how important it is to maintain the standards amongst your service lines, but how can you improve them? With high standards as the expectation, it is very easy for your customers to highlight failings in service provision, whereas a consistent and positive run of form will often be ignored by your clients.

To catch their attention, to highlight your organisation's positive performance, you need to shock them.

You need to think of way to go above and beyond the expectation, even when that expectation is already extremely high. It will vary from industry to industry but in general terms you have 3 things you can offer your customer:

• Action
• Information
• Communication

If you can carry out an action that is beyond expectation, then you've done it! You have improved the provision of service on behalf of your business, this could be as simple as an engineer tidying up after themselves or a manager interacting with their customers in a proactive format, rather than responding only to escalations.

If you can’t provide an action, but you can provide Information and communicate it in a timely manner, then you are pushing the service envelope in the right direction. If all else fails and you cannot provide an action or any meaningful information, your only option is to communicate regularly to ensure your client is aware you have not forgotten them.

So what does good service look like in Britain today? The truth is, what used to be a high level of service looks like very normal service today. To make it clear that your business is providing ‘good’ service, you will need to motivate your team to provide regular and unique acts of exceptional service that go beyond your customer’s already high expectations.