Adopting a service approach to business

Whether working in a public or private organization, managers can play a key role in creating a culture that more effectively serves an organization’s client base

Ron Baker, CMA

“Canadians want better service from their governments.” With that declaration in mind, Service Canada was launched in 2005, to deliver programs on behalf of a number of federal government departments. It provides one-stop service to citizens for access to a variety of programs from obtaining a social insurance number to accessing a national job bank.

Citizen-focused program delivery is the first of four commitments made by the federal government as reported in the document Results for Canadians. A citizen focus means providing seamless delivery of public services. To that end, Service Canada has made building a culture of service excellence one of its key strategic objectives.

The role of managers in building a culture of service excellence can’t be overlooked, whether their organizational units deliver services directly to citizens or not. Service Canada’s approach to building such a culture is a useful starting point for any manager who needs to refocus an organization or a business unit.   

Organization-wide standards

Drawing upon value chain research, Service Canada has adopted five drivers of client satisfaction:

• Timeliness: satisfaction with service delivery times;
• Outcome: the client got what they wanted;
• Knowledge: knowledgeable and competent staff:
• Going the extra mile: staff went above and beyond to serve; and
• Fairness: the client felt they were treated fairly.

Performance measures, such as those found in the organization’s Performance Scorecard, are linked to these drivers. Examples include the percentage of telephone calls answered within 180 seconds (timeliness) and client satisfaction levels (knowledgeable staff, outcome, fairness and going the extra mile).

A manager of a finance unit (or human resources, IT, etc.) may interact primarily or exclusively with others within the organization, rather than the ultimate client. While many definitions of organizational culture can be found, I define it here as the beliefs, values and norms that, collectively, comprise the character of an organization. Since culture here is seen as an organizational phenomenon, the notion of building a culture of service excellence can’t be compartmentalized to those who deal directly with citizens. It must be organization-wide.

Service excellence and the five drivers of client satisfaction embraced by Service Canada are applied to everyone in the organization. There’s a link between being a citizen-focused organization and, say, the payroll unit in that organization. The link is culture. To successfully build and sustain a culture of service excellence, the beliefs, values and norms that embody this culture must be diffused throughout the organization.

The role of managers at all levels is integral to such a cultural shift. In a service culture, every organizational subunit provides products or services to a client, either internal or external. A payroll unit serves the organization’s employees; the budget sector of a finance unit serves senior managers, and so on. It’s important to adopt a service approach to the way each organizational unit conducts its activities.

Seven steps to adopting a service approach

Here are seven steps that managers should take to transform their organizational unit into a service provider:

1. Identify your clients.
2. Develop market research.
3. Know your business.
4. Seek opportunities for excellence.
5. Link local performance measures with broader organizational performance measures.
6. Establish continuous feedback mechanisms.
7. Focus on successes and improvements.

Identify your clients

Begin by thinking about who your organizational unit serves. It serves somebody! If your unit provides strategic financial information for decision making, then who are the key decision makers that use, or should use, the information you provide? There may be more than one client group, and different groups may have different needs. A key managerial challenge is to coordinate the delivery of service to various clients groups, particularly where conflicts arise (i.e. where demand exceeds capacity during certain times of the year).

Do your market research: understand your client and their business

Once you’ve identified who your clients are, get to know them better. A quick and effective way to do this is simply to meet with them. You want to get a sense of how well your organizational unit serves their needs. Indeed, you will need to understand what their needs are and whether some of the services you provide are more essential or time sensitive than others.

Internal service providers, such as finance, human resources, and IT units, serve a divergent group of clients in an organization. As such, you can’t be successful at achieving service excellence without understanding your client’s whole business.

Know your business

In addition to understanding the business of your organization’s clients, it’s essential that you fully understand the business of your organizational unit. An internal review of your unit is useful, to map out not only what your organization does, but also how they do so. The best source of information for this is your staff. Procedural manuals and policy guidelines are also essential sources of information.

The results of such a review vary greatly depending on the organizational unit. Some questions that should be asked and answered in the review would include:

• What does this unit do? What should it be doing?
• How are its objectives accomplished?
• Is there any process redundancy or legacy tasks being performed that no longer serve a purpose?
• Have processes and procedures migrated from departmental standards? How and why?
• Where do workload bottlenecks occur and why?

Identify opportunities for excellence

This is primarily an internal exercise, but not exclusively so. The main goal here is to work with your staff to identify opportunities for them to become providers of service excellence. Obstacles to service excellence must be identified from the internal review (step 3) and, working with the staff, must be overcome as much as possible. Obstacles may be technological, procedural, policy- or resource-based. There may be opportunities to address some obstacles through targeted staff training.

It’s critical that this stage of service excellence adoption be carried out in an inclusive manner with all of the staff in the work unit. They are likely the best source for identifying obstacles and may very well be the best source for identifying opportunities for better service delivery. An inclusive process also contributes to building the culture of service excellence and accountability.

Finally, it’s important to consider the role of the manager in this process. It’s likely that your staff will be dealing directly with your clients daily. Service excellence, therefore, is often in their hands. A key role for the manager is to identify ways in which you can enable your staff to reach the levels of client satisfaction you’re seeking.

Link local performance to organizational performance measures

There must be consistency in performance measures throughout the organization for the organization to operate coherently. The five key drivers of client satisfaction used by Service Canada, for example, can apply throughout that organization. By adopting performance measures that promote timeliness, outcome, knowledge, going the extra mile, and fairness at the local organizational subunit level means that the culture of service excellence is built consistently throughout the organization.

Establish continuous feedback mechanisms

An organization that is client-focused and service-driven must be plugged into its client group at all times. The mechanisms are easy to employ: interviews, surveys, staff roundtables and supervisor feedback can all be used. It’s also important to make your clients aware that you are seeking to build a service-oriented unit and that you want to know how your unit is doing.

Feedback will provide you with some of the indicators, such as client satisfaction, that you will use to gauge your unit’s performance. It also keeps you in touch with your client so that you’ll know if and when their business changes. Your unit can then adapt to serve new business needs.

Focus on success and improvement

Finally, it’s unlikely that an organization or subunit dominated by negativity will excel in client service, particularly if staff is being asked to go above and beyond to achieve client satisfaction. Feedback to staff should focus on improving shortcomings rather than dwelling on mistakes, and should celebrate and build upon successes.

The role of managers — all managers — is critical to the success of creating a culture of service excellence because such a culture is unlikely to develop in a fragmented organization. All sectors of the organization must embrace a culture of service excellence. To do so, managers must view their organizational units as service providers and adopt a client-centred approach consistent with that being adopted across their organization.

Ron Baker, CMA, is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Business Administration at the University of Regina. This article is adapted from a presentation he made to Service Canada staff this year.

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