“Talking about this service issue reminds me why I love working with your company”.
That was a comment that come up in a conversation I had with one of my clients last week.
What we were discussing was an issue that had arisen during the week, leaving some concern that we might not be doing everything the way it should be done.
Instead of simply giving lip service to our clients, we listen to problems they have with our service. In fact, we treat service issues very seriously.
So seriously that we have engrained our team to identify and alert everyone on the team of the issues. We call these service alerts.
What is a service alert?
Service alerts come in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes a team member might sense that something is not quite right with how an issue was handled. Sometimes it may be a technical problem no fully resolved. Other times it might be mis-communication or a misunderstanding that lead to an issue arising in service.
Often these service alerts are a result of proactively identifying an issue that could snow ball into a time bomb if we didn’t change the way something is done.
Whatever the issue, if it impacts a client, we have a service alert on our hands.
You see, we are really focused to improve areas of our service that clients are interested in or feel strongly about. When our clients bring up issues, members of our team are focused on trying to figure out what caused that issue and how to make sure that issue doesn’t pop up again.
In essence you can think of service alerts analogous to defects from LEAN and Six Sigma. If there’s an issue with our process, training, or a person problem, we use service alerts to bake our service-related issues visible throughout our team.
Essentially our philosophy on service alerts can be divided into those issues related to purpose, process, or people.
Purpose—what our clients see as problems that may impact their purpose or value. We want to identify issues and then devise strategies to make sure our processes and methodologies fit with yours.
Process—how we assess any major issue to make sure that everyone is capable and available to follow our process, that our processes are flexible to accommodate special situations and that the steps in our processes add value to clients. Note: we are constantly evaluating, testing and improving our processes.
People—we recognize that we’re only as good as our people. We make sure our people understand our processes and their importance. We continually make sure that our team is on board and evaluating where process needs tweaking and engaging them in devising the tactics and strategies to improve service-related issues.
We start with alerting the team to the issue. Every single person in the team sees the alert, first through an email, and then in our all-team huddle (I’ll talk about huddles some other time, but suffice to say everyone on the team knows what’s going on with our clients because we all discuss changes, announcements or issues with a client network).
We then have the team come up with a tactical fix that will be implemented immediately to rectify the current situation. This solution is to make sure the client’s issue is remediated, but is only a quick fix to correct the current problem. We are very interested in getting tactical solutions in place ASAP—normally within 24-48 hours of an issue arising.
As part of service alerts we go a step further.
As a tactical solution is devised and implemented, we realize that we cannot simply call that a day’s work. We know that a strategic fix is needed to proactively prevent an issue from arising again. This is where planning and some experimentation might come into play. Our goal is to get a strategic fix to a problem within 7 days (but for some solutions, it might take longer depending on the nature and scope of the fix).
Once a strategic solution is found—often these solutions are constructed from participants of our client-relationship team, service management and team member—the alert is closed out. We want to ensure that a working solution would withstand the test of time.
We track the number of service alerts and make open alerts visible throughout the team. Those alerts that have stayed open for over a week as part of their daily metrics. Our leadership evaluates these numbers and dives into alerts that haven’t closed (haven’t been completely resolved with a strategic solution) and open up paths to resolving alerts that haven’t been resolved.
We own our service alerts and value our responsibility to deliver exceptional service. Without service alerts, our issues would be lost in the weeds.
