Philip Harman When businessmen attain the desired level of service, maintaining their standards become a great challenge for them. It is a tough job to maintain quality at excellent level for the service providers. It is as difficult and important as to establish and attain such quality.
There are generally two ways of maintaining service quality – the proactive approach and the reactive approach.
Proactive
The proactive approach is all about trying to gather feedback of the customers about the quality and suggested ideas of improvement. Proactive approach can be done by the method of –
• Staff training
• Gap analysis
• Surveys and administering questionnaires
Staff Training – Staff training is one of the major aspects of the proactive approach. Personnel are trained generously by their companies and they spend quite a good amount of money on it so that they can tackle all the complaints and queries of customers. It will be alright if the company decides to hike the price of its services or to change its offerings. For example, multiple customer queries have been handled by the staffs about the price hike, if any fast food chain decides to increase the price of the items in the menu. If the staffs can not provide satisfactory explanation of the price hike, then it would lead to customer dissatisfaction and poor quality.
Gap Analysis – In order to analyse service quality, the step of gap analysis is often adopted by the providers. Every company wants to offer the best quality to their customers. But the best standard is always not possible for them to provide. So, the gap between the existing and desired service standard helps the providers to improve the offering in the future.
Surveys and questionnaires – This approach helps a company fulfil the expectations and demands of their customers and to improve its standards as well. Demands and common issues of the customers can be identified with the help of this survey. This also helps the company to improve its offering.
Reactive
A reactive approach is to improve the service standard after receiving complaints from the customers. The company firstly apologizes to the customers and then tries to resolve the situation.
Measuring Service Quality
Always remember to place a metric system for measuring standard. These parameters will help to rate customer expectations, service models and businesses. It helps to create a competition between the staffs to maintain service standards.
Once you put this measuring system, a standard can be chosen as mandatory service standard that the company tries to maintain.
