Excerpts from In Search of Excellence
Tom Peters & Robert Waterman Jr, Chapter 6: Close to the Customer
- The best outside analysis of the close-to-the-customer-through service concept that we have come across was performed by Dinah Nemeroff.
- Nemeroff finds three principal themes in an effective service orientation: (1) intensive, active involvement on the part of senior management; (2) a remarkable people orientation; and (3) a high intensity of measurement and feedback.
- As we have found over and over, it starts with senior management. Nemeroff neatly calls it “Service statesmanship". Senior executives exercise that statesmanship through personal example.
- Their commitment starts with a company philosophy. With service as their top goal, they said that “profitability naturally follows”.
- Nemeroff found that top management directly intervenes in decisions about service. These mangers have frequent regular meetings with junior professionals who respond to customer mail. They pen “marginal notes on customer correspondence.” And “engage in dramatic service delivery gestures to increase visibility to customers.” (And, we would add, to reinforce this service message throughout their own organizations.)
- Of another aspect of top management style, Nemeroff makes a crucial and surprisingly subtle point: “Interviewed executives believe they must maintain a long-term view of service as a revenue builder.” This point is all too often missed in big American companies.
- Profit objectives, while very necessary, are internally focused and certainly do not inspire people by the thousands way down the line.
- Service objectives, on the other hand, are almost without fail meaningful to down-the-line employees. A strong sense of personal accountability among down-the-line employees is crucial. And one knows that has been accomplished when someone in the field says “Each one of us is the company.”
- Nemeroff makes the important connection that “customer relations simply mirror employee relations.”
- Inseparable from the way the service-oriented companies manage their people is the intensity of measurement and feedback systems. Perhaps her most significant finding in this regard was that new rewards and incentive programs are in continuous preparation.
- This really struck us in all aspects of the work of the excellent companies. Programs for people - incentive programs, training programs, or simple hoopla - undergo continuous retuning, much as product development does. No practice is expected to have impact forever, and programs for people have life cycles just as products do, maybe even shorter ones.