The skill of delivering great service at scale

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There is a skill to achieving scale when delivering great customer service. This is the number one desire that national brands, owner operated or franchise models, businesses with thousands of staff, serving hundreds of thousands of customers spread out across multiple locations wants.

Recently we have watched massive crowds gather again at stadiums across the country to celebrate the AFL footy teams, this too is an example of scale when it comes to delivering great service.

The reason most businesses want this is because its their brands reputation of consistent service that they are trying to achieve. Consistency is hard to achieve because every single employee is the company, which means a brand experience for a customer is defined and measured by their interaction with an individual employee.

The golden question I get asked when it comes to scale and serving large volumes of customers is; what is the magic formula to get a level of consistent service across so many human touch points?

And the answer is in the question, it is a formula. In fact, it’s the sum of many parts all happening at once that allows a consistent quality service to be experienced by so many customers at the same time, regardless of who the employee is.

The skill to scale that I refer to; is in your business having a relentless focus on the sum of many parts and coordinating them to fit into one large plan with systems and structures to support the plan.

Here are 18 parts that make up the sum and will get you thinking about how when they are all put together it can achieve great service at scale:

1. Align your leaders to what you expect in service
2. Leaders set clear objectives for what you want your service to look like in action
3. Choose champions in the business to nurture the service expectations
4. Set clear benchmarks for service expectations
5. Decide on your service goals for everyone
6. Track progress for everyone
7. Communicate to all staff the key service messages/ expectations
8. Create a service message campaign for the year
9. Onboard all the staff to that campaign
10. Provide self – paced training of service skills
11. Provide visible progress to those who are showing up to training
12. Provide a timeline for service training to be achieved by
13. Create exciting, engaging training experiences LIVE
14. Do LIVE training in small chunks, often
15. Praise those who are serving customers as per expectations
16. Make the praise/ recognition visible to all employees (tell stories and context)
17. Measure your benchmarks of service expectations
18. Review and start again

Great service is a practise not a project, it never ends and has no completion date. But great service at scale, requires an ongoing cycle of many parts all coming together at the same time that touches each individual employee, who is the company.

Question

What parts are you needing to focus on to achieve scale?