THE PATH TO FIRE SERVICE EXCELLENCE
MANAGEMENT
Noted management consultant Thomas J. Peters, in his book Thriving on Chaos—Handbook for a Management Revolution, says that there are only three ways to achieve true, lasting strategic distinction regardless of the services you provide or the size of your organization: through superior service, superior quality of product, and constant innovation.
PROVIDING SUPERIOR SERVICE
When you are given suggestions on how to provide better service, do you reject them, reasoning, “We’re no worse than anybody else”? What a logo that would make for your department! “The Everywhere Fire Department. Founded 1910. We’re no worse than anybody else.”
In Thriving on Chaos, Fred Smith, founder of Federal Express, says: “The United States has been terrible as it applies to customer service. When the history of America…is written, I think that’s going to be the most incredible part of the historian’s view of what we did during the sixties and seventies. I mean, killed the goose that laid the golden egg…. Somehow, management let employees believe that the customers weren’t important.”
Buck Rogers, once IBM’s corporate marketing vice-president, goes on to say, “If you get satisfactory service today from the corner gas station, your local department store, or your friendly computer company, it’s a bloody miracle.”
How does your department rate in terms of customer service? Consider not only emergency response and salvage work but also the dispatch center, the fire marshal’s office, and wherever else you interact with the customer.
It is common practice to overpromise and underdeliver (not necessarily in emergency response). We tell the customer that a project will take a week and then he is lucky if he gets it in two. It is better business sense to promise two weeks and then deliver it in less time. The customers will believe you are doing them a favor. We all know how frustrating it is to be promised a specific completion time and then to have it not adhered to; do not underrate this frustration when planning your department’s strategy.
This Peters anecdote shows how subjective customer service is: “Well, Arch McGill, who was IBM’s youngest vice-president in the company’s history, said a while back that the customer perceives service in his or her own terms. I always modify McGill’s comments. I always say the customer perceives service in his or her own unique, idiosyncratic, end of the day, completely human, totally irrational, and frequently erratic terms.”
If we are to achieve superior service, then we must view through the eyes of our customers every part of everything that we do to support and deliver the services that we offer. How else can we identify what we have to do to improve our service?
MEASURING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
Peters lists 10 considerations that are keys to effectively measuring customer satisfaction:
- Frequency. Conduct formal surveys of your customers every 60 to 90 days. Share the results with your members.
- Formal. Hire an outside firm or agency to conduct an annual image survey of your customers. Share the results with your members, even if they cause embarrassment.
- Content. Ask some standard, quantifiable questions. Did we respond to your complaint in a reasonable time? How were we to work with? Did we do our best to lessen your property losses? Compared with other service agencies, how would you rate us on a scale from 1 to 10?
- Design of content. Do continual “naive” listening. Listen to what customers believe to be the truth; do not just tell them what you believe to be the truth. Make sure you aim questions at intangibles as well as tangibles.
- Involve everyone. All employees should participate in improving service and planning for those improvements. The firefighters and company officers, for example, will make the greatest difference in customer service on responses.
- Measure everyone’s satisfaction. Measure the satisfaction of all direct and indirect customers—all users of your department’s services.
- Combination of measures. Use measurement questions that can be quantified by degree of satisfaction— for example, 1 (poor service) to 10 (excellent service).
- Relationship to rewards. Establish a reward system as a positive incentive for the entire department.
- Symbolic use of measures. Post key customer satisfaction measures in prominent areas around the station.
- Other forms of measurement. Include in every job description a qualitative description of the person’s “connection to the customer”; include in every performance evaluation an assessment of the person’s degree of “customer orientation.”
SURVEYING CUSTOMERS
We often treat a single complaint as an exception and simply write it off. Well, every complaint is an indication of something and merits attention. Think of it as yet another chance to excel, even if it initially is in the eyes of just one customer. Peters says that there are two kinds of companies in the world: those who treat the complaint as a disease to be gotten over and those who treat it as a golden opportunity.
When surveying customers, make your questions objective. Subjective questions cannot be measured. You can make subjective questions objective simply by putting a graduated response of 1 (poor) to 10 (superior) after them.
Don’t use percentages to indicate that your department is performing up to standards. Does this sound familiar? “Out of 1,000 questions we asked we received only 30 negative responses. We are 97 percent okay.” Instead, note that there are 30 customers out there who believe that we need to reevaluate how we are impacting them.
Don’t use averages either—they are downright dangerous. Use the actual numbers instead. Emphasize the areas where service has failed so you can focus attention on the areas that need change.
Don’t use some marvelous system to select customers for your inquiries. Use random selection. Also, be sure to follow up on every telephone complaint. If you inquire regularly and correct your operations quickly, you will find that most corrections to poor service quality cost little and can be implemented without severe disruption to existing operations.
Look at any specific service that your department offers, preferably one that is receiving periodic complaints. Bring in some of the customers and discuss how you can improve service delivery.
SUPERIOR PRODUCTS
Peters says that there are at least 80 studies out that point to the customer as the source of new products and new service ideas. Ask yourself: What is so special about your department? How arc you different from any other department? What are you doing for your citizens that everyone else isn’t doing?
In Thriving on Chaos, Michael Porter of Harvard contends that there are only three successful generic strategies: (1) overall cost leadership, (2) differentiation (by this he means leadership in quality, service, or innovation across a broad market), and (3) focus (on specialties).
Can you describe what is unique about your department? Can your members? Have you embodied and publicized what you are all about? Try this: Call one of your fire stations where there is a new member. Ask him to describe your department’s uniqueness. If that person does not use the same words that you use, can you honestly say that you have a “strategy”?
Carn ing out the mission is equally as important as a precise and brilliant strategy. It is up to you to make sure that everyone knows which way the boat is heading, that the course is nearly always in that exact direction, and that it is a joy to be along for the ride.
Your is actively recruiting new businesses and homeowners. The uniqueness of your department can be a selling point for the community. Your department’s activities and costs can be an asset rather than just another tax liability.
Ask your employees, customers, and other community agencies to tell you whether you are unique among fire departments. If the answer is “no,” you need to put this at the top of your personal and professional agenda. What services are you offering that you can uniquely improve and expand? What services are other departments across the country offering that you can establish in your region?
BECOMING OBSESSED WITH LISTENING
Peters says, “There is a strong case to be made that the single most significant managerial productivity problem in the United States of America is quite simply managers who are out of touch with their people and out of touch with their customers.”
You must get into the habit of “managing by wandering around” (MBWA). You need to get out of the office—out to where your members are, out to where they’re working. You also need to be where your members and customers (citizens) are interacting.
Following is a Peters anecdote on MBWA: “A colleague of mine, who happened to be from the HewlittPackard Company, the company where the MBWA term came from, spent maybe an hour talking about MBWA. A break came along and one of the fellows from the companies we were working with came down front. ‘Boy,’ he said to my friend, ‘I don’t understand how you do it. How you have got the time. It takes me all day to do the…budget and to sit on the 16 committees that I am assigned to. Where do you guys find all the time to do this wandering?’ My friend turned to him with a perfectly straight face and said, ‘I don’t understand how you guys have the time to do ail this planning. It takes me a full day to wander around.”
Do you listen—really listen —to your customers? Is it “naive” (not suspicious, hut genuine) listening? Solicit input from those closest to the customer. Listening to the department’s various customers (victims, hospital staffs, developers) must become everyone’s job.
Thriving on Chaos lists three characteristics of good customer listening:
- If you are going to really listen to your customers, get out from behind your desk and go to where your customers are. Your office shields you from what is really going on in your department. Too many of us use the desk and office as a security blanket.
Peters writes, “Sam Walton, of the Wal-Mart corporation, called it the empty headquarters theory of management.’ He said, ‘1 prowl the halls of the Bentonville Wal-Mart headquarters whenever I am in town. If I find a vice-president in his office, he is in serious trouble.’ ”
From experience, Peters believes that if you are not spending 70 percent of your time or more out of your office, then you are not in touch with your customers.
- Put yourself and the customers into a setting that indicates you are ready to listen to them, not preach to them. Your office is not that place.
- If you are effectively listening to the customer, you will receive useful feedback and be able to effectively act on what that feedback tells you.
Peters says that “managing by wandering around” is not about telling people how to do their job. It’s about listening, teaching, and dramatizing your own concerns. Remember, listening does not mean simply “educating” the customer.
As a manager, your information system usually is internal. To check, look at your desk. How many external messages of any type are there? Very few, I bet. This is another indication that you have no system in place for soliciting customer input. As Peters says, “Too many people, at too many levels, in too many functions, listen too little and too late—and ignore what they hear too often, and act too late.”
To learn to become obsessed with listening, invent one new listening ritual and start it today: Call some recent customers, follow up on one complaint yourself, or begin to plan a methodology to gather customer information on a periodic basis.
Start to “manage by wandering around.” Set a goal of spending 30 percent of your day or week out of your office. Then gradually increase this time you spend in the field. It is your opportunity to symbolize, explain, and push your vision for the organization.
In the next article we will discuss the third way to achieve strategic distinction: through innovation.
