Harnessing Service Quality Guidelines to achieving Service Excellence

Organisations everyday, are faced with the pressure of business forces and their health lies in correctly harnessing them and in order to effectively neutralise the effect of these forces to their advantage they use management guru’s frameworks such as Porter and Downes (see chapter 2). In this era one of the most important business forces affecting organisations is the customers’ expectation of a better service and in today’s competitive market dealing with service simply means success or failure. However very few organisations are currently meeting customers’ expectations of service, especially those within the SME market, who: • Have loose customer service policies • Do not view service as a major force • Have not developed a culture for service By highlighting the importance of service as a force and using other organisations as benchmark for developing a service guideline, the author has developed a number of steps to help organisations build a foundation to an effective service culture that is part of the organisational DNA. These guidelines are to be meshed with current strategies and culture that an organisation may have in order to be fully effective. The author indicates that the guideline (see chapter 5) must be used as the basis of this cultural development and further studies into each section of the guideline must be conducted in order to fully utilise the benefits of each area.MS