Service with a smile

FM is a service industry and customer care remains a continuous process which requires excellent communication, the ability to understand needs and  a passion for good service

2 September 2010 

Who are your customers?
Customers are defined as those paying for or receiving goods or services. For FM, your main customer is your organisation’s executive management. They are responsible for providing FM with its budget. However there is a second group who use the FM services, made up of employees, employees of third parties, visitors including the organisation’s customers and potential customers, stakeholders in the business (eg, shareholders) and perhaps members of the public.

1. Understanding needs
The first step in delivering good customer care is to understand your customers’ needs – at corporate, departmental and individual level. Start by reviewing the corporate mission statement with senior managers to ensure a clear understanding of the corporate strategy and how that impacts on FM, eg: policies, standards, contracts and specifications. Review the service level agreements (SLAs) and performance indicators (PIs) to ensure that they support the corporate mission statement and analyse the trends of the PIs to assess how good your department’s service delivery is in relation to their SLAs. At individual level, hold one-to-one meetings with the client department heads, and PAs, to identify which FM functions take priority for their part of the business and understand what is their perception of FM’s current standard of delivery for those services.

2. Setting standards and measuring performance
These discussions will enable the FM to ensure that there is a single vision for customer service with clear and agreed roles and responsibilities. It is possible to review the existing SLAs and amend as necessary. Both parties, client and FM provider, need to work together to define the appropriate service levels and performance indicators to empower front-line staff to meet local priorities.

3. Lead by example
Customer service culture is defined by the way FM people think and act. Excellent customer service starts at the top of the FM organisation. Creating an FM customer service vision gives a sense of purpose to even the most mundane tasks. The senior FM managers must demonstrate to all members of their FM teams, as well as their customers, behaviours which underpin the values of mutual respect, service, understanding and teamwork. Without this active role model, any attempt to create a customer service culture will be undermined and will fail.
To achieve an active role model:
• set the vision in line with corporate strategy
• measure current perception to achieve a baseline
• communicate the vision, set direction
• build a “one-team” approach, by communicating your vision with service providers
• inspire your management team on their contribution to make all the team feel valued
• agree an action plan on how to deliver the new programme to improve customer care
• review at least annually and set new targets
Customer service should be integrated into every aspect of FM work and management. To achieve this, interpersonal skills and abilities criteria should be included in the hiring, training and appraising of FM staff and service suppliers.

4. Creating a one-team approach
Whichever outsourced approach is adopted it is important to create a One Team approach. In this way the customer receives consistent good service from whatever source.
To achieve this:
• share the overall vision for FM with in-house and service provider managers and staff
• ensure the vision’s adoption is part of the contractual agreement with service providers
• ensure the adoption of the vision is placed within the in-house appraisal system
• lead the “one team” by communicating the vision, strategy, goals and tactics
• hold monthly operational meetings with the whole management team – in-house together with service providers to review:
» forthcoming business events, for example annual results presentation
» service failures and their recovery together with service successes and their communication
» project progress
» initiatives being adopted by FM, for example move to zone waste bins away from individuals to a central point.

5.Communication
Communicating with customers is a key part of good customer care. Communications, to be most effective, are best carried out through multiple channels – departmental and team meetings, emails, informal chats, notice boards, and your intranet. It is also important for FM staff to have a high visibility in the organisation. This is achieved by regular floor walks, seeking out key customers for even just a greeting.

6. Recovering from failure
Despite the best endeavours from time to time there will be service failures, where the promised delivery has not been met. Excellence in service recovery is an important part of winning high ratings from customers. FM teams should have a recovery process in place which will have the following features:
• acknowledge the failure to the customer and the immediate delivery team
• put someone in charge of the service recovery process
• gather the facts and surrounding circumstances
• work out what’s necessary to deliver the required service
• ask the customer to confirm that the proposed actions deliver their need
• deliver the required service
• ask the customer to confirm the service failure has been recovered
• hold a review of the service failure and recovery processes with the FM team using a no-blame approach.

Based on the BIFM Good Practice Guide to Customer Care, by Anne Lennox Martin and Ivan Newman and sponsored by Reliance FM – included free to BIFM members with this issue. To order more copies email gpg@redactive.co.uk