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

Technical Support? Whenever you transfer someone on the phone from one person to the next, there’s a
    possibility of dropping the ball—of losing the phone connection or of failing to convey the information or the tenor of the situation along with the actual transfer. (Whenever an insurance sales-person hands the customer to the production department for service, that’s where a problem is likely to happen. After a design client meets with the creative director, and the creative director then tries to convey the client information to the designer actually doing the job, that’s where the ball is in danger of falling to the ground.)
    This brings us to what a car customer typically experiences: You bring your car for service to a service department. There is a person at the door who greets you and takes you to the service advisor . The service advisor writes up what’s wrong and calls the mechanic . The mechanic takes the car away. At the end, when it’s time to pay the bill, the service advisor reappears, gives you the bill, and you have to go and deal with a disconnected, bored cashier , who is probably not focusing on you, not living up to service standards that match the car this same dealer sold you, and not capable of explaining what the strangely coded charges were for, because she wasn’t even aware of your existence until this very moment.
    Imagine instead that a single superbly trained service advisor, Sharon , takes care of you from the moment you enter the premises until the moment you leave the premises. Sharon greets you.
    Sharon writes up your service ticket. Sharon summarizes your complaint to the mechanic. Sharon alerts you when the car is ready. Sharon presents you with the bill, and Sharon accepts your payment. Lexus settled on this as their ideal approach, to be used to a greater or lesser extent depending on the size and other realities of a specific dealership.

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    Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit
    Systematically Reducing Waste to Add Value—for You
    and Your Customers
    Since we are fully committed service obsessives, you may be surprised at the extent to which we are fans of the best available manufacturing -based systems and controls. We’ve benchmarked and adopted approaches from companies as far-flung as Xerox, FedEx, and Milliken. And over and over, we’ve found insight in such manufacturing-centered systems as Lean Manufacturing and Total Quality Management.
    For right-brain, high-touch service types, this probably sounds kind of like being forced to do homework. Yeah, it is kind of like that. And it’s worth it.
    These systems share the insight that a company can increase its value by continually locating and trimming waste. If applied appropriately, this emphasis can strengthen a service-centered company as much as it can a manufacturing concern. For example, we can speed up service response times by removing wasted time and motion; improve the variety of our offerings by having appropriately scaled processing equipment located throughout our facility; and enhance morale and profitability by reducing the time our staff spends waiting around. These examples, you may recognize, represent three of the seven classic ‘‘wastes’’ identified by Taiichi Ohno, father of the Toyota Production System, (the direct fore-runner of today’s Lean Manufacturing methodology):
    ? Unnecessary transport
    ? Excess inventory
    ? Excess and non-ergonomic motion
    ? Waiting
    ? Overproduction/ production ahead of demand
    ? Inappropriate processing
    ? Defects

    Building Anticipation Into Your Products and Services
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    Why Benchmark Manufacturing Companies?
    To optimize efficiency, reliability, and delivery, we recommend you benchmark the wizards of manufacturing. Their successes come from the best kind of hard, scientific data, so learning from them can really tighten up your service ship. Concepts like error-tolerant design (for example, a door that won’t let you lock yourself out accidentally),