Number of words: 535
Consider the following scenario: You have had your car repaired at a new local garage. A week or two later, your neighbor, curious about whether she should also use this new garage, asks, “Did they fix the car?” “I think so,” you reply. “It seems to be running smoothly, so I guess they did a good job.” Then your neighbor asks an interesting second question: “Did you get good service?” What does this second question mean? Surely, fixing the car is the service, isn’t it? Well, yes and no. Fixing the car is part of it, and an important part it is, but by itself it doesn’t constitute good service.
Your neighbor is asking about a whole range of other activities that influence your satisfaction with the service providers. Were they accessible? Was it easy to make an appointment? Did they deal with the matter expeditiously? Did they take the time to explain to you (in language appropriate to your level of understanding) what they had found, what, precisely, they did, and why?
When you first approached them, did they ask intelligent questions about symptoms, trying to come up with an informed guess as to the scope of the problem? Or did they just say, “Leave it with us and we’ll get back to you,” sending you away to worry about how big a problem you had and how much it might end up costing? Did they make you feel as if your car was just one more job to be done, or did they convey the impression that they wanted your business? Did they deal with you with an appropriate mix of respect and friendliness?
If complications arose, did they make strenuous efforts to contact you, inform you of developments, and involve you in the decision as to what to do next? Or did they make all the decisions for you, failing to distinguish between mandatory and precautionary measures and leaving you with a feeling that you might end up paying for work that wasn’t truly necessary? Was it easy to settle the bill and understand the charges? Did they provide advice as to how to prevent recurrence of the problem, or to avert other potential problems detected in the course of the repairs?
As these questions show, the practical meaning of good service in car repair extends far beyond technical excellence in servicing the car. It is necessary to service not only the car, but also the customer. Indeed, it may be more important to excel at servicing the customer. Many customers are unable to distinguish between outstanding technical work and the simply competent. In choosing garages, they may pay more attention to the quality of service received than the quality of work performed, which, of course, is not the same thing. And even if the customers are sufficiently sophisticated to distinguish between outstanding and competent work, their technical needs may call for only the competent: They know that any number of providers can fix the car, and, rather than seek out the most highly qualified (and probably most highly priced) technician in town, these intelligent consumers will appraise providers along a number of dimensions, including responsiveness, attitude, and other nontechnical “service” criteria.
Excerpted from ‘Managing the Professional Service Firm’ by David Maister, pages 69 to 70