Discuss the factors in the service process that can lead to a failure to meet customer expectations, and their influence on service recovery.

Even with the best of intentions services will one time or another fail. Service breakdowns can occur for a number of reasons. For the customer, however, the customer service provider represents the organization when the service breaks down. The provider must identify the cause and remedy the situation to the customer’s satisfaction. Human beings make mistakes; this is a fact. Mistakes are often glaring to customers, who can be very unforgiving at times. The best you can hope for when something goes wrong is that you can identify the cause of the service breakdown and remedy the problem quickly to your customer’s satisfaction. By accomplishing this, you may maintain customer loyalty. Numerous factors in the service process can lead to a failure to meet customer expectations, and they can all influence service recovery. Generally, these factors fall into three categories organizational, employee, or customer.

Recommended reading: Discuss the process and the barriers of communication

Organizational factors related to processes, procedures, policies, and structures that, when not functioning effectively, can detract from service quality. As a frontline provider, you play a crucial role in implementing many of these practices. As such, you become the organization in the eyes of a customer. When a customer yells at you because he or she perceives that something did not go as promised or expected, he or she is usually yelling at the organization through you. That is why you must control the tendency to take the anger personally. Instead, continue to listen objectively to what he or she has to say in order to get the information needed to solve the problems. Even so, there are some factors over which you have no direct control but that affect you and your customers. These include the following human resources, organization and structure, processes and programs, internal communications, technological support systems, Product and service design, and delivery and standards.

The screening, selection, training, performance appraisal, and compensation of employees who interact with customers are crucial. Managers should take care to develop and periodically update a job description that focuses on the competencies required for the position. This will help ensure that the right person is hired for a job and that employees are being recognized for what they do. From a training standpoint, most large organizations spend millions of dollars each year training and updating employee knowledge and skills. Such efforts help companies stay competitive. Also, many organizations continually evaluate and modify compensation and benefits packages. They do this because all these factors affect employee morale and ultimately can create customer satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, depending on how they are handled.

Relationships between members of departments or cross-functional teams are typically clearly defined. Reporting structure, levels of empowerment (what employees are authorized to do and what decisions they are allowed to make), and integration of functions are examples. A thorough understanding of these relationships is important in making it possible to provide the best service possible to customers. Such knowledge also allows you to follow up in cases of service breakdown and to recognize the limits of what you can and cannot do to satisfy customer needs or complaints.

The way complaints are handled, sales or promotional tools are used, products and services are delivered, and billing, advertising, and consumer customer communications work fall into this category. As a frontline provider, you must have a thorough knowledge of special sales and promotions and how all these systems function in service delivery. This allows you to respond consistently and correctly to customer questions or complaints.

Failure to understand these processes can lead to miscommunication and customer dissatisfaction. Employee factors involve the following: Verbal, nonverbal, and written communication and listening skills will often determine whether you’ll have to initiate a service recovery strategy. For example, if you effectively communicate usage instructions for a piece of equipment you sell, a customer may not have difficulties once he or she gets home. This avoids customer frustration and reduces complaints. It can also result in time and effort saved for you and the customer, as well as in money saved and good customer rapport maintained.

To effectively serve customers, you need a strong knowledge of products, services, organizational structure and goals, processes, procedures, and how to effectively provide service. Through your knowledge, you will be able to quickly and effectively identify needs and offer the right solution to address customer needs and concerns.

The way you perceive your organization, self, job, and customers determine much about the quality of service you provide. For example, an upbeat, positive focus will allow you to look forward to and enjoy each customer encounter (positive and negative). Your positive attitude will help you make a sincere effort to identify and satisfy customer needs.

There are times when customer actions or inactions can lead to a service breakdown, as described in the following. The customer may fail to use product or service information correctly. No matter how meticulous your explanations are, customers sometimes fail to listen to or follow instructions for proper product or service usage. By disregarding or missing key information relayed verbally or in writing, they increase the likelihood of improper use, and therefore dissatisfaction. They also increase the possibility of damage or injury. Subsequently, they may lodge a complaint of a defective product or ineffective service.

Your objective in providing exceptional service, while raising your rating on the

Relationship rating point scale should be to practice active listening and read your Customer’s nonverbal cues in order to determine his or her level of understanding. Use effective open-ended questions. Only through your vigilant efforts can problems and misunderstandings be identified and corrected before the customer develops a problem or becomes dissatisfied.

A customer may sometimes fail to follow through. Sometimes a customer buys a product or service and has a problem that necessitates recovery efforts. In these instances, negotiations often take place in which the customer and organization agree to take specific actions. Sometimes, the customer may not live up to his or her part of the bargain. For example, suppose a customer buys a new computer from your organization, has trouble getting it to function properly, and calls to complain. 

He talks to a technical support representative who informs him that the company stands behind its product warranty. The representative also asks the customer to write down error messages that appear on his computer monitor for the next two days so the problem can be better diagnosed, and then bring the unit to the store for repair. Two days later the customer shows up at the store with the computer but has forgotten to write down the error messages.

This type of customer behavior and failure to follow through can be frustrating, but it may be unavoidable in some instances. When such events occur, the customer may still become dissatisfied and may even blame the organization or you. Either way, everyone loses. About the only thing you can do before and after such an event occurs is to practice effective communication skills and try to emphasize the importance of the customer following through with instructions and requests.

Service failures and the subsequent service recovery efforts of an organization can have a profound effect on customers’ satisfaction with an organization as well as on the quality of the relationship with the organization, despite other efforts by the organization to build long-term relationships with its customers. Considering the health care sector, service failures, like clinical errors, are inevitable. Many healthcare organiza­tions do plan well for clinical problems, but they do not anticipate service prob­lems with the same care.

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Berry (2009) argues that the organization should always apologize for service fail­ures, but an an apology alone is seldom sufficient. Service recovery strategies that can be used by Mpilo  Hospital in Bulawayo include the following three major strategies: Proactive or preventive strategies, process strategies, and outcome strategies.

Proactive strategies are for identifying problems before they happen; these strategies are built into the design of the service, employee training, and the delivery system. Process strategies are for monitoring the critical moments of the service delivery. Outcome strategies are for seeking out problems after the service experience has happened.

Mpilo Hospital can also use the Preventive strategy. Preventing problems is easier and less costly than recovering from them. Proactive strategies are designed to identify and fix any trouble spots before they become a service failure. This can be done by forecasting and managing demand. If a statistical prediction of patient demand on a particular day indicates that the hospital will be full, then a preventive strategy is to schedule full staff on each shift, make extra supplies available, and prepare departments for full capacity. The same strategies could work for a physician practice that is anticipating a lot of patient visits on a given day. An appointment system may help manage the expectation of patients, and sufficient staff and supplies can be made available. If the organization plans poorly, and patients have to wait longer than they feel is appropriate, their perception of the overall quality of their service experience declines rapidly, and a service failure results. Keeping the wait time short avoids this type of failure.

If demand can be forecasted for a longer period, then other proactive strategies can be implemented. For example, if demand in two years is expected to increase by 20 percent, new capacity should be built, new employees should be hired and trained, and inventories should be increased to prevent the occurrence of long waits, unavailable supplies, or insufficient and untrained staff.

Even if major steps (hiring more staff, building new capacity) cannot be taken because of limited re­sources, employees may be trained to cope with demand surges. Just as hospitals run disaster drills with fire-and-rescue teams, so too can hospitals and clinics train their healthcare workers and give them practice exercises to handle unexpected increases in demand.

The use of quality teams, training and simulation can also help Mpilo hospital. The popular use of quality teams is another preventive strategy. Get staff who are directly involved in the service experience together, and ask them to identify prob­lems they have seen or heard about and to suggest strategies for preventing those problems. Adequate training of frontline employees before they even begin to serve patients is also a preventive measure. Any highly reliable organization ensures that its frontline staff knows exactly what customers need, want, and expect from the total experience and are motivated to do whatever it takes to meet (at a minimum) and exceed those customer factors, every time.

Performance standards are tools that not only help employees do their job during the service experience but also guide employees and the organization in evaluating the performance afterward. Employees and their managers can also use these stan­dards to monitor how well or poorly they have performed over time. Some standards are purely preventive because they can be met before patients enter the door. For example, if they can reliably predict the number of patients who will come in on a given day of the week, that forecast can be used as a basis or standard for the quantity of medical supplies to prepare and order. If the predic­tion is correct, the service failure of not having enough supplies on hand should not occur.

Performance standards also help patients understand the level of service they can expect. Examples of such standards include “We will try to resolve problems of types A, B, and C within two hours,” “We will try to resolve problems of types D, E, and F within one week,” or “If you leave a message on our help-desk voicemail, we will call you back within one hour.”

Process strategies for finding service failures monitor the delivery while it is taking place. The idea is to design mechanisms into the delivery system that will catch and fix problems before they affect the quality of the healthcare experience; blood pressure and heart monitors are examples of such mechanisms. The advantage of process con­trols is that they can catch errors as they happen, enabling immediate correction.

Process performance standards provide employees with objective measures with which to monitor their own performance while they are doing their job. One example is specifying how long a patient has to wait in the emergency de­partment before receiving attention. Other illustrations include the number of times per hour that a nurse must check on an intensive care patient or the number of patients waiting for service before a cross-trained staff member steps in to re­duce the waiting time at peak demand. These are all process-related measures that allow the staff to minimize errors or catch them while the healthcare experience is underway.

Because many service failures are caused by provider errors, all personnel should be trained to solicit complaints about their own performance. This is not an easy task for providers, as they may see mistakes are punished while catching errors is rewarded, and most people do not want to admit their mistakes or feel criticized for them. Thus, the organization must design a complaint strategy that accommodates its staff’s perception about complaints.

Mpilo Hospital has to empower staff. Provide employees with the freedom to address complaints and service failures on their own, as much as the organization’s business strategy allows. Autonomy encourages staff to do what is right for the customer, and that prevents service failures from happening in the first place.

Mpilo Hospital can also use the following outcome strategies. Outcome strategies identify service problems after they have occurred so that prob­lems can be fixed and future problems can be prevented. The most basic outcome strategy is simply to ask the patient, “How is everything going today?” Other more systematic illustrations include (1) providing toll-free or 800 phone numbers for use by former patients who want to report their dissatisfaction and (2) asking pa­tients to fill out a brief questionnaire when they pay their bills. Use of the following employee-driven strategies will also help

Employees, especially direct or frontline providers, should be trained to handle service failures and to creatively solve problems as they occur. Scenarios, game play­ing, videotaping, and role-playing are good strategies for developing employees’ service recovery skills. Just as umpires can be trained to recognize balls and strikes, healthcare personnel can be trained to recognize and fix service errors.

The basic service recovery principle is to do something positive and to do it quickly. Strive for on the spot service recovery. Capturing the many benefits of quick recov­ery is one major reason benchmark service organizations empower their frontline employees to exercise discretion in correcting errors.

Many times, customers will log complaints with the nearest employee they can find, so organizations benefit from asking employees to attempt to capture the complaint as soon as possible. The physician or staff member who initially receives a complaint should complete a patient complaint form, and staff members who receive the complaint should immediately refer the patient to management per­sonnel. Even if a manager is not immediately available, the staff member should complete the form and begin to take action because complaints must be captured as soon as possible.

A necessary further step in any service recovery strategy is that employees should inform their managers about any system failures they encounter, even if they have already initiated successful recovery procedures. If they do not report the failure, the problem may recur elsewhere in the organization. Collecting these data enables management to move beyond reacting to com­plaints and on to determining the root causes and preventing them from happen­ing. 

All healthcare personnel should be trained to apologize, ask the patients about the problem, and listen in a way that gives patients the opportunity to blow off steam. Considerable research indicates that allowing customers the opportunity to vent to someone with authority (e.g., manager, supervisor, vice president) is an important step in retaining their patronage (Heskett, Sasser, and Hart 1990).

This strategy is more effective when it is followed up with an acknowledgment, a thank you, and a tangible reward, even if it is small (Berry 2009). The tangible reward could take the form of a meal voucher at the hospital cafeteria, and the acknowledgment could take the form of an apology and thank you letter from the CEO.

Bibliography

Field, M.( 2003 ), Fixing Healthcare Service Failures

Crnich, N.(2001), Service Recovery

Yagil, D. (2002). The relationship between Customer satisfaction and service workers’ perceived control. International Journal of Service Industry Management, 13 (4) 382–398

Johnston, R. (1995), “Service failure and recovery