Service is a state of mind

Successful organisations trade not just on the quality of their products (which may vary little from one to the next), but also on the quality of their service. It is this that will often distinguish a company from its competitors, staking its position as a market leader. Service is not an added extra – it is integral to building customer loyalty.

Building trust with the end user is the lynchpin to achieving consistently good customer service. Building relationships with customers through listening, learning and, importantly, responding, is essential. Tailoring solutions is paramount – an idea or model designed to achieve customer satisfaction in one situation can fail to deliver in another.

In 1998 Trillium won the prime contract to own, manage and maintain the Department of Social Security (DSS) property portfolio. We researched different approaches in the service industries to creating a single point of contact for all service enquiries. We looked to a solution from the USA to help shape the heart of our operation in the form of the customer service centre (CSC). But although the basic foundations were based on the US model, it was not appropriate to replicate it exactly in the UK. We had to tailor the set-up to reflect operational and cultural variations so as to avoid a mismatch between customer expectations and service delivery.

The CSC co-ordinates requests for work from the client and takes calls from any of the 95,000 DSS staff nationwide. It currently receives 30,000 calls per month. The CSC was deliberately named a ‘service’ centre rather than a call centre as it was the intention to create a team of highly trained, well-informed individuals.

These customer service representatives (CSRs) are not just message-taking machines, but intelligent points of contact who take ownership of an enquiry from the very first call through to the completion of the request.

To create an environment that encouraged ownership of the problem and a desire to resolve it, it was necessary to overcome the famous British reserve and adopt the more outward responsiveness found in the USA. We found that the best way of achieving this was to recruit either fresh from universities or employ graduates newly into their careers. These recruits spent three months training with managers seconded from US firms before facing the client.

It was not a simply case of coaching the CSRs in ‘have a nice day’ techniques, but instilling standards that promoted an understanding of the customers’ requirements and provided for a team-based approach to the management of issues. We imported a US-style ‘can do’ culture.

There is no quick way to deliver customer service. But encouraging empathy with the client and the promotion of a creative, tailored solution is a basis from which a company can build a culture of exceeding client expectations. Facilities management can only meet the challenges of these expectations by embracing innovation and bespoke solutions as core values.