It's all in the Delivery

Martyn Randell discusses the importance of delivering great customer service...

As every good cricketer will know, delivery is the key whatever the wicket conditions. Having just started paternity leave (baby girl as you asked and yes, she is gorgeous) I have snatched a few moments watching England (much to my dismay) lose to South Africa; and the difference between a good, indifferent and poor delivery really does make all the difference.

Service delivery is what makes or breaks facilities management, and in changing economic expectations, the definitions of what service excellence means can alter and transform its delivery.

A good starting point is to identify what service excellence means.

There is no one definition as businesses have different requirements and influencing factors have varying degrees of impact. My role here at Fasset is about establishing what the requirement for service excellence at a multi-tenanted location is; and how we deliver it.

It is important not to underestimate this task as service delivery in our business touches every employee, department and task - to a degree. It is not exclusive to those who deliver ‘face-to-face’ but encompasses property services, project and engineering; and in order to know how to deliver excellence, everyone needs an understanding of what service actually is.

Our company is an advocate of holistic service delivery and believe that this is how we achieve excellence across the board. We employee 150 people including engineering, housekeeping, maintenance and security teams; and keeping outsourcing to a minimum helps us maintain this service link. Our culture is to share and understand that in order for service delivery to be our ‘USP’ we must work together to understand how to make the difference.

Just like the cricket analogy you as a spectator or you as the customer don’t really need to know the backroom information (what happens in the changing room, stays in the changing room) you just want to trust that the team will put in a winning performance.

Ultimately it is about the people who are providing the service - whether they are outsourced or not - living and breathing the values of the organisation they are working for. Listening to the commentators saying that they felt that for the next game Strauss needs to engage Pietersen more with the team to ensure a better performance; is absolutely the right strategy. A captain or manager has a crucial role in training, developing, encouraging and inspiring the people around them. Without this how can they expect a winning performance?

There also needs to be an in depth knowledge of the game, the rules and regulations and tactics. This is where benchmarking, measurement and adaptability come into play. It is only by looking back and dissecting an outcome can you develop your next move.

Translate this to business and you have to balance efficiency and cost but inside of those two posts you can take the service anywhere you like. Process management for our business helps us define all of the elements of service undertaken and therefore we can identify where improvements are needed. Fasset is an innovative company that has taken this process-led culture from manufacturing and applied it to a service industry. Where other facilities management providers have focussed on cost savings we have raised the bar in service delivery.

So has our game plan delivered results?

Don’t get me wrong, we don’t score six at every delivery but our results do make impressive reading. Langstone Technology Park, our flagship location in Havant has gone from 71% to 98.5% occupancy in under 2.5 years, Our customer service in 2011 scored 92% overall (38% above the national average); and the site complies with all relevant environmental legislation and other requirements to which Fasset subscribes (Langstone Technology Park – BS EN ISO 14001:2004). Service delivery is always top of the agenda. We are constantly refining processes to ensure that standards never slip…

…and we are back to cricket…roll on the ‘Second Test’ at Headingly next week.

So, this parenting malarkey…not so tricky after all!