Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization by Leonardo Inghilleri, Micah Solomon, Horst Schulze Page A

significant additional training. It stands for:

    Building Anticipation Into Your Products and Services
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    M istakes
    R ework
    B reakdowns
    I nefficiencies
    V ariation in work processes
    Any employee, at any level of your organization, not only may but must alert the appropriate person to a Mr. BIV situation at once so it can be addressed right away. When Mr. BIV is encountered, it helps to ask ‘‘Why’’ as many as five times to reach the root cause rather than merely the symptom. For example:
    Problem : Late room service
    WHY? Waiters stuck waiting for elevator
    WHY? Elevator monopolized by housemen
    WHY? Housemen searching for/storing/hoarding linens WHY? Shortage of linens
    WHY? Inventory of linens only sufficient for 80 percent occupancy You can deputize every employee as an ‘‘improvement manager’’
    who is responsible for helping to implement the Mr. BIV system.
    Mr. BIV represents a concise example of a Continuous Improvement System. The Continuous Improvement paradigm was developed in manufacturing industries, so, unfortunately, service, white collar, and
    ‘‘creative’’ professionals often make a knee-jerk assumption that it is not relevant to what they do. This is their great loss—and their customers’, too. It doesn’t really matter whether your product is electrical insulation, freelance editing, or wedding photography: You will only be able to consistently deliver a superb product when you have an effective system for monitoring and improving the product. That is why it would be hard to overstate the value of applying continuous improvement to the service aspects of your organization. It can close the competitiveness gap for a latecomer to a service industry or widen the distance between a standout service leader and the also-rans.
    It’s powerful stuff.

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    Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit
    Don’t Kill Mr. BIV’s Messengers
    Never attack employees for the problems that your Continuous Improvement System reveals. You need employees who are not scared or cynical: employees who are open about revealing defects. A defect that happens twice should be assumed to be the fault of the process; the cure is in fixing the process . If you attack your employees, they’ll never help you find a recurring problem, and you won’t have an early chance to fix the underlying defective process.
    Eliminating Defects by Reducing Handoffs:
    Learning from Lexus
    Leonardo recounts the story of how Toyota, with the assistance of Horst Schulze and other customer experience experts from varied disciplines, created the Lexus brand with the explicit goal of providing both an exceptional product and exceptional service interactions. Exceptional service was Lexus’s best hope to build customer loyalty in an industry where loyalty traditionally comes only after multiple car purchases. (Only after you yourself had purchased a series of reasonably reliable Mercedes over more than a decade—typically three cars in a row—or, if it were a ‘‘family tradition’’ to own Mercedes—your grandfather drove a Mercedes, your father drove a Mercedes—could it be expected that your future purchases would be Mercedes. Toyota had no intention of waiting so long for its first crop of loyal Lexus customers.)
    Lexus’s final plan incorporated features we’ve addressed in earlier chapters, including greeting customers respectfully by name and unobtrusively logging and respecting individual customer preferences. But in addition, the company zeroed in on a strategy that we haven’t discussed yet: reducing service defects through the minimization of ‘‘handoffs’’ between service providers.
    In many contexts, lapses in service are most likely to occur Building Anticipation Into Your Products and Services
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    when you are handing a customer over from one function, agent, or division to another. Have you ever had to re-explain yourself from the ground up when a phone service representative forwarded you to