Being all things to all customers is an impossible and almost always detrimental service feat. However, providing your market with customized services is a highly desirable objective that can lead to greater customer satisfaction and increased revenue. Unfortunately, many in the service industry are unable to achieve a successful balance. As a consequence, they face low productivity, higher technology investments but fewer returns, and little in the way of service innovations.
Happily, solutions for improving customer focus and generating profits are in essence, being manufactured. Practices and concepts long embraced by the manufacturing sector can be equally effective when implemented in service operations. By adopting some of manufacturing’s strategies and principles, your company can realize payoffs in both productivity and profitability.
Doing it fast, getting it right
More than anything else, achieving fast response times and producing high-quality products have become bottom-line capabilities for competitive manufacturers. Such speed is translated not only as time to market, but also as building in capacity for flexibility and rapid reaction to market changes.
One way manufacturers excel is by speeding up production and maximizing efficiencies in conventional or standard product areas, and by separating their customization efforts entirely. They then judiciously allocate their resources between conventional products, which satisfy the majority of their customer base, and customized ones, which satisfies a smaller yet lucrative market segment. At the same time, they effectively use customer service to provide valuable feedback to help them create across-the-board product improvements and develop innovations or customizations.
This is perhaps one of the best manufacturing strategies that service industries can borrow. Why offer all products or full services to every customer? Too many companies invest in widespread staff training and extensive support of their entire breadth of product and service offerings when the majority of service efforts are actually spent on the routine, not the exceptions. Identifying and dividing services between those that are pedestrian and those that are preferential allows service operations to more effectively allocate their resources accordingly.
By the same token, service operations can follow manufacturers’ example of efficiency through automation. Standardized or simple processes, which often compose the bulk of services, should become automated as much as possible, while more complicated matters are instead routed for personalized service and hands-on attentiveness. In other words, your organization should get faster at processing the higher volume/lower value business, and get better at the lower volume/higher value business.
Such channeling of resources and processes results in significant efficiency-management, waste-reduction, and cost-savings. It also lets your organization more effectively satisfy the rather large base of regular-needs customers, while appropriately catering to customers with customized needs, which can often be a group with greater value potential.
And like many successful manufacturers, service organizations must leverage their customer service systems to improve their product offerings. Both quality and innovation can stem from proper feedback structures. While this frontline intelligence is extremely beneficial to product development, it’s important to maintain an overall strategy. Service offerings can become too extensive, and therefore, too expensive to support. Instead, product development efforts can mimic those within lean manufacturing environments, whereby products are introduced alongside accompanying efficiencies.
Imitation is the highest form of profitability
Why reinvent the wheel? Borrowing proven productivity initiatives from the manufacturing arena can be a great path to an improved service operation. Explore what works in a production line or warehouse, and replicate a strategy that will bolster your customer service programs.