John Waterhouse

John Waterhouse

The consistency idol

The consistency idol

Professional-service firms, like many others, are working hard to improve standards of customer care and quality. Tony Scott wonders if they’re getting the issue back to front.

SCENE ONE  Early morning by the buffet counter aboard a train. I am collecting a bag of crisps and a small, very full cup of tea. The train is rocking violently, so I ask to transfer the drink to a larger cup.

 “Can’t do that, sir,” says the steward.

 “Oh,” I say. “Why not?”

 “I have to account for all the cups, you see.”

 “You can have the small one back.”

 “Sorry, sir,” he says, smiling tolerantly. “If I did that for you, I’d have to do it for everyone. And then I’d be out of large cups, wouldn’t I. Enjoy your meal.” (For a more encouraging train story, see 'Service from a railway guard', below).

 

SCENE TWO  The cool grey modular office of a large consultancy firm. All the support staff, like the junior consultants, sit in individual work stations divided by fabric-covered partitions. Some of the partitions contain window-sized glass panels.

Two secretaries at adjoining desks are trying to organise some work between them. They have to stand up to talk to each other because the glass panel – through which they can see each other sitting down – cuts out the sound. “It’s a bloody nuisance,” says one of the secretaries. “I spend half the day bobbing up and down like a yo-yo, to talk or to pass work back and forth.”

“Why don’t you take the panel out?” I ask.

“We’ve asked. But it can’t be done. The office manager says it’d cost too much to get every panel in the building removed.”

 

STORIES of the first kind are familiar to all of us as consumers. Esther Rantzen used to make regular fun of them with her Jobsworth awards on That’s Life. The commonest targets are post offices, hospitals, airports, banks, and central and local government departments: officials and officiousness in all its forms.

Stories of the second kind are familiar to all of us as employees. Every organisation I’ve been inside has had irritants like the panels: daft situations where the organisation’s “rules” prevent a common-sense solution.

And yet, the buffet steward and the office manager both believed (and doubtless still believe) that they were on the side of the angels. Pressed to defend their decisions, the cry of both would be: “You’ve got to be consistent. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise.”

In that cry and in that belief, it seems to me, lies an enormous trap for any organisation – especially in a business like insurance, consultancy or fund management, which lives or dies by the perceived quality of its service. The trap is believing that consistency has any connection with quality. The two examples above are easy to see (or are they?). But what about the official standards that our organisations set for our own services, or for customers?

To the extent that firms try to establish single office-wide sets of quality rules, for themselves or their clients, I believe they risk missing the point.

Service quality cannot be a supply-side issue – assessable by reference to internal monitors or fixed and uniform rules, however well-meant or broadly phrased those rules are. It can be measured only on the demand side – in terms of what customers think of it. So all internally generated standards suffer from an intrinsic flaw: they look from the single perspective of the supplier, not the multiple perspectives of customers. 

As a result, they tend to contain a set of procedures which cannot by its unitary nature be ideal for all. At best, it can be a little better than average. At worst it can even undermine management’s credibility. Evidence for that claim is not hard to find. Listen to the corridor gossip in organisations which have imposed official “quality” programmes, and depressingly often a reference to the programme’s title will provoke only hollow laughter or outright scorn.

Indeed, one survey in the USA suggests that quality programmes of this kind have failed to achieve significant change in 70 per cent of the firms who’ve tried them. 

The supplier’s-eye-view, in effect, encourages organisations to use an absolute steamroller to crack a relative nut – and not very well at that. The voluminous Financial Services Act, for example, with all its associated regulations, is meant to be a quality-control manual for the financial sector. The quality-control manual for the US retailer Nordstrom – which, partly thanks to management guru Tom Peters, has a worldwide reputation for superlative service – takes one sentence: “Use your own best judgment at all times.” 

Which manual would you put more faith in?

Acknowledging all letters within a week, and replying to them within three, might be an advance on previous performance. But real quality comes from knowing that Client A, being an impatient character, needs a same-day reply, while Client B, being more concerned not to make mistakes, prefers to have a considered answer regardless of how long it takes... and making sure they both get what they want.

Seeing, in a law firm, that all reports go out thoroughly proof-read and in smartly bound covers might, similarly, be an improvement. But real quality comes from knowing that Client C wants a long document with all the i’s dotted because he has to get past a prickly finance director, while Client D, who is given to shouting into two telephones at a time, wants all your recommendations on one side of one sheet of A4... and making sure that both demands are satisfied.

Different people want different things – just as I did on the train, or the two secretaries did in the office. Why should we assume clients are any more consistent than us? The truth is, I suspect, that clients are absolutely consistent in only one area: they all want outstanding service. “Outstanding” meaning whatever it means to each client. Quality service consists of finding out what each client wants and making sure that he or she gets it, regardless of what others want or get.

Real quality, in other words, means inconsistent delivery. Consistency is a false idol – and it needs toppling.

As long as we believe that quality service is just about consistent delivery, we set an invisible ceiling on our organisation’s ability to get better in this area. And the more elaborate the idol’s demands, the more closely defined the service rules, the less likely we are to listen to what the customer actually wants or to deliver the perceived quality the whole process is designed to achieve.

Three examples, in very different contexts, may help to illustrate how insidious the worship of the consistency idol can be.

• Last year, I had a loft extension built at home. Naturally, I looked at numerous building firms, all of which stressed how competitive their prices were. But my wife had only two key criteria: the firm had to have experience of loft work; and, most of all, it had to guarantee to do all the work from outside, leaving the new staircase until last. Her concern was that the house shouldn’t look like a tip during the project; price was a lesser issue. Firms who didn’t take the trouble to find that out, or who couldn’t promise because “we don’t do it that way”, didn’t get past first base.

• A couple of months ago, I happened across a copy of the memoirs of Edwin Waterhouse, the 19th-century founder of the Big Four accounting firm that bears his name. It is very apparent from his book that his passion was not for consistency or compliance with a set of rules at all. He simply had a burning desire to help his clients see the true costs of what they did. It was he, and others like him, who made companies and government departments eager to buy audit advice long before audit became a statutory obligation.

• Earlier this year, a consultancy firm asked me to deliver a session on written communication skills during a conference of senior managers from a dozen client organisations. The obvious quality way to play such a session was to take along a grab bag of possible topics, find out on the hoof what the managers wanted, and tailor the session to that. But the firm, which is proud of its quality accreditation, insisted on a formal session plan (as it does from its own people). It sent me a long planning form, with pages of boxes for detailed timings, learning points, objectives and the like. 

A true quality plan would have amounted to: ask the audience what they currently find difficult; offer some helpful thoughts on those problems; and let them have a go on an appropriate couple out of the dozen exercises in my bag. But that wouldn’t have done. The form demanded detailed responses in every box – far too much space for an ask-float-try approach and far too little (even if it were worth it) for an outline of all the 132 possible combinations of exercises and the thinking behind each.

So the complex form – which some of the firm’s own executives apologised for – did not, and probably could not, guarantee the quality of anything, least of all the session I delivered. Instead, by substituting a script for spontaneity and rehearsal for responsiveness, it risked stifling the initiative of presenters and thereby actually undermining the chances of delivering a truly high-quality service.

None of this means, of course, that ISO numbers and all their relatives never matter. One of the inconsistencies that service firms have to deal with is that some clients – especially in the public sector – insist on accreditation as a minimum requirement. But accreditation is then important because it matters to those particular clients, not because it guarantees any general level of service.

A partner in one of the UK’s largest accountancy firms – who spends much of his time assessing his own firm’s output – summed up the argument to me very succinctly a couple of months ago. “Quality has nothing whatever to do with checklists,” he said. “It comes down to three simple questions:

• Did the client get the results he wanted?

• Did he like working with the people he got?

• Will he use us again?

“The only people who can answer those questions are clients. And they won’t give a damn what anyone else felt about the service – least of all whether a committee gave it a gold star for meeting some ‘standard’ or other. All you have to do is go and ask clients those three questions. And keep asking them. 

“The rest is just guff.”

 

Tony Scott (www.oliverscottconsulting.com), a director of Oliver Scott Consulting Ltd,  specialises in solving business communication problems.

 

Service from a railway guard

Some weeks ago, I caught a morning train from London to the Chilterns for a meeting with a potential client. The train got half a mile out of Paddington, stopped for an hour, then reversed back to Paddington. The circumstances make a fascinating study of service hits and misses: how the rules in large organisations can get in the way of good service, and how good service often consists of sensible unorthodoxy.

MISS The conductor on the train makes an announcement about the hold-up 20 minutes after we stop. He says the hold-up will delay us 10-15 minutes more (we are there another 30 without further explanation).

HIT While we are stopped and at my request, the train driver (there are only three or four passengers aboard) climbs out of his cab and uses the trackside phone to ask a signalman to call ahead to explain I’ll be late. I’ve no mobile on me and it’s raining at the time. 

MISS Back at Paddington, a supervisor with a walkie-talkie gathers three passengers, apologising for the delay and explaining that taxis are waiting to take us to Marylebone to an alternative train. They aren’t. Another walkie-talkie arrives. Why not use any old cab? “Can’t do that,” says the first walkie-talkie. “We always use one cab firm, and I can’t go round giving authority to use another.”

HIT One of the passengers is John, a black Network Rail guard based in Marylebone. Seeing our mounting frustration as the walkie-talkies stride ineffectually up and down the rank, he leads us to the nearest empty cab. “I’ll fix the fare with the train company later,” he says.

MISS At Marylebone, the alternative train goes four minutes before we arrive. Nobody has told the platform staff. 

HIT I call the potential client to rebook our meeting for another day. He is very calm. “We had a call from the train company saying you were held up.” 

MISS I need to replace my useless day-return tickets and, if possible, persuade the train company to cover the wasted journey from my office to Paddington. Platform staff say: “See the duty station manager.” I find him behind an unmarked door in a  scruffy office. Five staff stand around, waiting for the manager, who’s muttering about down-sidings into another walkie-talkie. Nobody offers to help.

HIT John turns up. “You’d be better off with Customer Services,” he says. “I’ll take you there.” He guides me up to their office and introduces me.

MISS Access to the Customer Services office consists of a tiny, low glass-covered hatch, through which you have to bend down to speak to the staff inside. They give me new tickets, but can’t promise a refund of my travel costs (which amount to all of £3.60). Who can? Only head office, they say. Let me phone them from here. “Can’t do that, sir. The phone won’t go through the hatch, and you can’t come in. This is a secure office.”

HIT Back down on the platform, looking for a phone, I see John with a colleague.  John’s colleague takes me to another office and fixes for me to use the phone there to call head office. “Dial 91 to get an outside line,” he explains. 

MISS Head office Customer Services are engaged. I talk to the office of the Divisional Director. “I’ll have them call you back at your office in an hour,” says a lady who sounds like a PA. It doesn’t happen. I call back in the afternoon. The DD’s office checks with Marylebone and calls back ten minutes later. I can have a refund. 

Why is this last stage a miss? Well, what would you think of an organisation where you had to go to director level to get a decision on £3.60?

About the Author

Tony Scott is a management consultant, trainer and coach, and the director of a London-based international consultancy (www.oliverscottconsulting.com). He specialises in helping businesses and people to communicate better – face to face or on paper.

What does the painting "Windflowers" by John William Waterhouse represent?

What I mean is if there is any symbolism in that painting? Any professionals out there who could tell me the symbolism of it? If so, then 5 stars for you!

There isn't an enormous amount of symbolism in this painting. Sometimes, the Pre-Raphaelites were simply going for an ideal of beauty incorporating classical or (supposed) late-medieval style, subjects, and appearance, along with their conception of spiritual and creative sincerity/integrity vs. standard academic art of the period.

In fact, their works -- like this one -- often didn't really look medieval or classical at all.

John Waterhouse/Chopin