Change management in a customer service strategy: Tip #5

This chapter examines the role of organizational agility in creating customer service excellence by looking at how well organizations anticipate and respond to the changing world. This is based around these five key self-evaluation questions:

• Constructive criticism is an essential element of our culture.
• The organization provides methods, tools and training to enable change.
• We have tools and techniques that facilitate the capture and sharing of knowledge and expertise.
• The organization monitors and shares information about the changing socio-economic environment.
• Our people respond positively to change.

The organization provides methods, tools and training to enable change

Tip #5, Change management in a customer service strategy, is excerpted from Chapter 6 of the book Business Success Through Service Excellence, by Moira Clark and Susan Baker, published by Butterworth-Heinemann, a division of Elsevier, 2004.

In order to capitalize on the advantages of creating a culture where constructive criticism is an essential element, organizations need to ensure that they invest in equipping employees to manage change. This is because although positive attitudes to "irreverence at work" and a climate of encouragement go a long way towards enabling change management, employees also need to be able to call on the most appropriate tools and training. What gets offered will vary according to the experience and history of the individual organization. However, best practice organizations are distinguished in that they employ a portfolio of approaches as a means to an end, as a way of working towards improved levels of customer service excellence.

Some organizations work to identify a common approach to change and then ensure this is diffused throughout. For example, this may include common formats to running meetings and post-project appraisals. It is also routine for organizations to adopt common tools across functions. Formal change management training programs are widely deployed and organizations distinguish themselves by deciding whether to run these in-house or use a third party to do this for them. Some organizations then make the most of joining forums for sharing experiences and best practice in what are essentially benchmarking operations. Two useful metrics in all of this are first, to track over time the percentage of people in the organization that have undertaken formal training of one sort or another in managing change and secondly, to audit how many days of change management training were provided across the organization in any one year.

Download the rest of this chapter on change management.

Customer service excellence: Six tips in six minutes

 Home: Introduction
 Tip 1: Using customer intelligence in a service strategy
 Tip 2: Improving customer service with effective business processes
 Tip 3: Employee satisfaction and customer service excellence
 Tip 4: Building a service strategy with organizational leadership
 Tip 5: Change management in a customer service strategy
 Tip 6: Customer service excellence best practices

These chapter excerpts from Business Success Through Service Excellence, by Moira Clark and Susan Baker, are used by permission from Elsevier Publishing. Published by Butterworth-Heinemann, a division of Elsevier, 2004. Purchase the book here