Good Enough is Good Enough If You Add Occasional Brilliance
by James A. Alexander, Ed.D. and Mark Hordes, Partners/Alexander Consulting

Said aloud, the concept of under-promising and over-delivering has a nice ring to it. Knock-your-socks-off service is another catchy phrase. Flawless consulting has emotional appeal. What services organizations would argue against these ideologies?

Smart services organizations do! Regardless of how good these ideas sound, in reality, they’re lousy operating philosophies by which to run a services business! Here’s why:

1. Over-delivering costs money. Unless you routinely budget for exceeding expectations, every time your services providers go above and beyond the call of duty (the project plan) they add cost which shrinks profitability. When you publicly proclaim this type of philosophy to your field organization, you tacitly give them your blessing to allow and embrace scope creep. Not a good thing.
   
2. If that isn’t enough to get you to re-think your client delivery philosophy, there’s an even more important reason to drop the cape of Superman services. Doing more than you’ve agreed to can be confusing to clients. You’ve committed to a specific project at a specific level of quality within a specific time frame for a specific price. That’s what the client wants and expects to get. When they get more or better or faster, they gladly accept it, smile, and keep their mouths shut. But it also leaves them wondering why. Did I pay too much and the consultants are feeling guilty? Did something go wrong that I’m not aware of? Am I being manipulated in some way? In trying to improve the client relationship this way, you may actually undermine and weaken it.

There are two important exceptions to this rule that need to be explained because occasionally blowing the doors off is very smart business.

1. Showcase Accounts: Whenever you launch a new services offering, one of your first steps should be to determine which showcase accounts you want to target as potential proof-of-concept sources. Endorsements from these high-visibility organizations will smooth and ease the acceptance and sale of your new offering throughout your market space. These important clients who are willing to pilot your new offering (and put up with all the hassles that go with it), deserve your commitment of necessary resources to make sure the pilot is not only successful, but very successful. This is a long-term marketing investment so you can ignore the normal rules of project financial performance and do whatever it takes to delight these vital accounts. The secret is to tell them why they got more than promised. Then they will understand, accept, and gladly champion your marketplace efforts.
   
2. Service Recovery: All of us err every now and then. If you’re doing innovative things in complex situations, problems happen. The key is to have a services recovery policy in place to handle those issues before they occur. Just like the pilot of an airliner who knows exactly what to do in an emergency, so should services providers understand what steps to take to recover from mistakes. The best services recovery policy is simple: Don’t hem and haw, don’t call management—immediately assume total responsibility for the problem and do whatever it takes to fix things beyond expectations, and fast. Most clients are used to getting the runaround when supplier issues arise so they’ll be amazed at your response and be genuinely thankful to your organization. Research supports that customer loyalty is greatly improved when great service recovery has been received.*

Remember, in most cases, good enough is good enough. Save your occasional brilliance for when it matters most.

*For an excellent discussion of services recovery, see Chapter 3 of Marketing Services: Competing Through Quality, by Leonard Berry and A. Parasuraman. 1991. New York. Free Press.

Jim Alexander and Mark Hordes are partners with Alexander Consulting, LLP, a management consultancy that creates and implements strategies for professional services organizations. They also are authors of the new book S-Business: Reinventing the Services Organization. Contact them at 239-283-7400, ac@alexanderconsultingsbiz.com, or visit www.alexanderconsultingsbiz.com.

S-Business: Reinventing the Services Organization
By James A. Alexander and Mark W. Hordes

S-Business: Reinventing the Services Organization offers a focused, cohesive, and comprehensive approach through which decision makers in product, professional services, and support services organizations can embrace services as a strategic weapon.

Click here, to order this extraordinary book at a 25% discount (offered to the SSPA Community).

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