Singapore's Service Levels

Here come an interesting set of figures from the local papers today. Basically, it was a survey to find out how well our Singapore sales staff are doing on these 7 factors -- Appearance, Ambience, Attitude, Acquisition, Assistance, After Sales and Approach.

And if you're like me, you'll probbly be wondering why they had to force all the factors to begin with 'A' , making their meaning not quite so obvious. National habit I presume. Anyway, here's the list of factors again with what they're supposed to chart (as per the papers with my comments in brackets) :

1. Appearance - Physical Grooming of the Salesperson
2. Ambience - Store Environment
3. Attitude - Warmth Enthusiasm, Rapport and responsiveness to the consumer
4. Acquisition - Method of returning customers their change or saying "Thank you" (See why I say this is 'forced' ? The last time I checked in the dictionary, acquisition meant to get and not to give. Just doesn't make sense!)
5. Assistance - How well the sales person understood the needs and preference of the customer
6. After Sales - How the sales person ended the visit (No wonder we have problems when ending the visit is as far as we are getting in terms of after sales!)
7. Approach - The reception the customer gets the moment he/she walks in.
   

And here's the data (click for larger image) :


Interestingly, we scored high for both appearance and ambience while not so well for the rest. And it seems to me like that translate into the fact that we essentially have pretty good 'hardware' (uniforms, store settings, etc ... basically things you can buy and plunk in place) but fare poorly in terms of the personal soft skills.

So, assuming that a certain firm really has this national average statistics for its stores and that it has a budget for improving service, shouldn't it be logical that its spending for improvement look something like this orange line below? :


To thicken the plot, lets further assume that life's simple and you can just sum up the improvements (which actually do add up to a 100%) onto the existing service level and voila!, there's a good chance that you can bring all factors up to over 70% (black line). Pretty decent 'A' grade for service if you ask me.

"But, you can't just add up figures like that!" you may say. Yeah, but that not the point I'm trying to bring across here. What I'm really trying to put across in this (over-simplistic) thought-experiment is this route of reasoning:

1. We have good facilities and hardware, but it seems like software's not doing too well.
2. Stop plunking more cash into asset investment and look at service and training instead.
3. Salespersons' response / behavior before, during and after customer interaction looks bad! Shouldn't this be something that can tackled with targetted training for salespeople?
   
4. Best part is, if service training is done right, it should cost less than hardware upgrades.
5. In the long run, motivation and experience play big parts so getting more experienced sales personel to mentor new hires may be a valuable way to maintain good service levels.
   

In any case, the way I see it, the statistics been done as a public good for retailers to use as a yardstick. Let's just see how many really do see this and make good of this knowledge.

As for the rest? They shouldn't even be in business.



[from : Today Newspaper Article 'Not lacking in will, just skill' - August 23, 2006]