“It may not be your fault, but it is certainly your time” – Barbara Williams-Skinner
Viewing entries tagged
service
In his book, Art’s Principles, the founder of Gensler, Art Gensler recounts how important it is for employees to wash their own dirty dishes in the company cafeteria.
“It sends four key messages,” he wrote.
- “You respect each other as teammates.”
- “You check your ego at the door when you come to work.” No one is above doing the dishes.
- It reinforces the start-to-finish mindset required for great service (important in all enterprises, especially service businesses).
- “Every experience comes together to create what a potential or current clients thanks about your brand. Your office is one big brand environment.”
These same principles apply to other things you might do at work. If you volunteer for a committee to benefit employees (even though you aren’t in HR). If you help straighten up a conference room at the end of the meeting (even if you are not whomever might do this if you didn’t and if you don’t know, find out) If you take the time to write up some company success to share with employees so that they can learn about it and feel proud (even though you aren’t in marketing). Taking the time to get to know everyone in the office and being interested in their careers (even though you aren’t the manager). Introducing people you meet to your company and what makes you all great (even though you are not in sales).
If everyone does things that aren't their job for the good of the group, then the group is good.
A lot of brands are talking about user experience. Products from Apple, Intuit, and so many others are lauded for their intuitiveness and great customer experience. But that brand experience extends beyond the product to how the customer is engaged in the store, on the website, in mobile apps, on social media, and the like. The brand experience is a venn diagram. You can’t just create a great product, you have to have great service. You can’t just provide an incredible in-store experience. You must also have high product quality. These things all go hand in hand.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is all the rage today with companies like Salesforce.com racking up huge profits and trading multiples, and companies like Microsoft introducing their own versions of the same. The same is true with people turning data insights into a business model (data-as-a-service or analytics-as-a-service). But the “as-a-service” business model isn’t new. Here are some examples of other products that have been sold as a service.
Alcohol-as-a-Service (AaaS): a bar
Food-as-a-Service (FaaS): a restaurant
Equipment-as-a-Service (EaaS): equipment rental and staging
Personal-hygiene-as-a-Service (PHaaS): beauty salons and barber shops
Reading-as-a-service (RaaS): story time at the library
Exit-as-a-Servce (EaaS): what a doorman does when you leave the hotel
Wayfinding-as-a-Service (WaaS): what the hostess does when she shows you to your table
Shelter-as-a-Service (SaaS): a hotel or even Airbnb
