This slide show is a presentation I do at London University on the consulting process. I covers the main steps in the process and includes some useful techniques – you can get it at my account on slide share.
When determining whether service delivery is meeting service expectations, it is useful to seek the views of service users. Quite often, an organisation will use a SERVQUAL questionnaire to gain the views of service users.
SERVQUAL (Service Quality) is a self-administered questionnaire designed to measure how customers view/judge service quality. Parasuraman et al (1994) defined service quality as the degree of discrepancy between customers’ normative expectations for the service and their perceptions of the service performance.
Parasuraman made the assumption that customers judge service quality by making a comparison between their expectation of the service that they should receive and their perceptions of the service that they actually receive.
Differences between expectations and actual performance are referred to as ‘gaps’. The SERVQUAL instrument can be used to measure any or all of the following five gaps.
Gap 1: Consumer expectation – management perception gap
Understanding the difference between consumer expectations and management perceptions of customer expectations.
Gap 2: Service quality specification gap
The different service standard between management perceptions of consumer expectations and service quality specifications.
Gap 3: Service delivery gap
The difference of service performance between service quality specifications and the service actually delivered.
Gap 4: External communication gap
The difference of communications between service delivery and what is communicated about the service to customers.
Gap 5: Expected service – perceived service gap
The difference between expected service and perceived service from customers’ point of view. Based upon these gaps, five behavioural dimensions of service quality have been identified and are now used in most studies using the SERVQUAL approach.
The 5 Service Quality Dimensions.
Users of the SERVQUAL questionnaire rate questions on a Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). The SERVQUAL instrument comprises 22 statements used to assess service quality across the five dimensions outlined in Table 2 with each statement used twice – once to measure expectations and once to measure perceptions.
I have attached an example of a generic SERVQUAL questionnaire as a PDF feel free to use. Also I have set up an free on-line version that you can use for your own assessments – you can find it here:SERVQUAL Questionnaire
Is foreign outsourcing of American jobs by American Companies immoral? I Say YES
Lawmakers in more than 25 states and in the United States Congress have identified foreign outsourcing as a threat to US employment and prosperity. Legislators must ban federal or state contracts with companies that would outsource jobs to foreign countries.
If no action is taking, US companies will continue to fire American workers in significant numbers and replacing them with foreign workers in low-wage countries such as India, China and Eastern Europe.
Of course, outsourcing is nothing new. The US and State governments and American Corporations have been outsourcing domestically for decades such services as data base management, janitorial services and payroll. The recent increase in foreign outsourcing in which US companies buy services from foreign-based providers has been make increasingly cost effective due to the personal computer and the Internet.
According to the data from several experts, over one third of the world trade growth has been achieved by means of foreign outsourcing to other countries. This has caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the United States and has had a major effect on the US Economy. Foreign outsourcing has changed the demand for skilled and unskilled labor and altered the structure of wages in the United States. Foreign outsourcing sends production to countries where labor costs are lower than in the US.
As a professional web designer, I have seen many American businesses outsource their web projects to foreign countries. American businesses fail to realize that they are spending their money overseas and not supporting the US economy. They are causing American workers to lose their jobs.
Mitch Webb
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Multi-Shoring – can risk be reduced by sourcing from multiple suppliers?
Although the reality is very different a recent article in computer weekly (a UK based IT Magazine) suggested that companies are being more flexible and attempting to spread the risk by outsourcing to different suppliers in different countries. As Leslie Wilcox of the LSE suggested the process looks like ‘spread betting’. Although this was a nice idea at least in print the practice of doing this for real is proving more difficult as the basis of off-shoring is often to move low value commodity call-centric services to locations where the language matches that of the home country. Accordingly much of the UK based off-shore market has naturally gravitated to India where a large number of skilled, low paid and disciplined people are available to man the phones. The Indian subcontinent turns out twenty to thirty thousand IT graduates a year for example and as a corollary of their degree course often speak English to a high standard. Another factor that causes management heartache with multi-shoring is the problems of managing several off-shore suppliers – its bad enough with one as the practice has shown.
Although innovation is appearing as more important at least in surveys when deciding on outsourcing the main attraction for off-shoring still remains labour arbitrage – i.e. cheaper wages. However in India of late they have been ‘enjoying’ 25% wage inflation in the outsource industry as highly skilled graduates are demanding better salaries – furthermore the attrition rate is extremely high and it seems that graduates do not relish a long term ‘career’ in a call-centre but treat the job as a stepping stone into the world of work. It is these factors (rather than risk reduction) which is causing companies to explore the world more carefully looking for the next low wage spot. Unfortunately there are not many options and talk of using Malta, Singapore are fanciful and only really in the margins, and Russia and China have immense language barriers to overcome before they can be considered
Another remark was made in the article that rather than always going down the low cost route ‘companies are asking for more innovation’ from their suppliers – this is not borne out by any evidence of course and is not clear what is meant by innovation but there is something useful in this comment. That’s the idea is that outsource providers can take up the proposition of innovation and actively improve their service, be more efficient, deliver in more up to date means, whilst constantly improving the cost base. In my view you can have innovation and cost improvement at the same time and suppliers rather than resting on their laurels after the deal is closed should from day one start to improve the service and pass on a fair part of this to the customer. Can you imagine what it would be like to be a customer of such an outsource provider? Working to improve their part of your business to make it more efficient and effective whilst reducing your bill year-on-year – rather than the account manager just turning up once a month to make sure you pay the bill and renew the contract! If suppliers did this they would probably have continuous rights to the business and be invulnerable to critique and outsourcing would look something more like a real partnership based on performance rather than just a mechanism gaining access to the market without much risk.
Royston
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