Service People - Effects of Mergers in the Tertiary Polytechnic Sector

Organizational change is experienced in a subjective way. When a merger or acquisition happens, as is currently happening on a large scale in the Polytechnic sector in New Zealand, the human impact is huge. Many staff struggle to cope with the change.

Vikki Roadley is both an experienced polytechnic senior manager and a student at Massey University studying leadership for her Masters. Whilst she was researching polytech staff's stories of mergers, she also did an art project as part of her methodology. Photographs of the mannequin-head sculptures she created were included in an Appendices to her research report. In 2019 the School of Management enabled us to engage a professional photographer to take good quality images of Vikki's sculptures and these were published in the journal Organisational Aesthetics along with an explanation of how they came about and some text explaining their significance.  The sculptures communicate in a visceral way the personal costs of mergers. In a forthcoming paper, we explore stories the participants told about mergers they had experienced. Our intention is to help staff re-story their stories of change so they are more hopeful. You can see all of the awesome sculptures here.

Sales and Service - Pharmacy Retail

Service people often feel tensions between the need to sell (sales) and the need to serve (service). This theme is explored in a paper Janet Sayers recently wrote with colleagues and a post-graduate student which was published in the Journal of Pharmacy Practice and Research. The context of pharmacy is shifting towards a bigger emphasis on sales (e.g. pharmacy superstores like Chemist Warehouse, now opening up in New Zealand).

Click here to take you to this paper. 

Demographic Change and the Customer-Centric View - Squash

Stephen Hodges, who was the Development Manager at Squash Auckland,  gave this presentation in class. The presentation focused on how Auckland Squash is trying to get more women and girls involved in the game of squash. The presentation covers the challenges for squash, the rationale for the programs, the programs that they have introduced, and some statistics showing how successful the program has been. In essence, this initiative shows a customer-centric change initiative. The process involved incremental innovation. The culture of traditional club squash is centered around competition - women and girls might want to get involved and stay in the game of squash for fun, social reasons, and enjoyment, as well as fitness, and then maybe competition. Taking a customer-centric view of groups that don't even use your organization yet (or as much as they could) enables innovative thinking and the development of new programmes.

Competitive Clustering

Competitive clustering occurs when groups of similar and related firms cluster in a defined geographic area. So, for example, the furniture stores in Wairau Park in Auckland, or a restaurant district in a city.

Competitive clustering is a concept of use when considering positioning the 'Service Facility'.

The following animated video from TED talks provides a helpful explanation of the science behind why similar services cluster together.

Service Blueprinting - Class Exercise on Cinema Queuing

On a Saturday night, I went to see Oblivion at Event Cinema in Albany. The movie was scheduled to start at 6.25 pm. We arrived at a bottleneck on the entranceway to the theatres (up the escalators) at 6.20pm. There was already a large number of people milling about, standing, in the entrance area, a large floor area with no seats or signage.  

No-one seemed to know why there was a delay in the screening. One couple were quite anxious as their movie started at 6.15pm and they were already late. Another couple also asked us what was happening as they arrived and we could not tell them as we did not know. The area looked like the diagram below:

The reason given for the delay (I asked the one attendant) was that the previous screening had not yet finished and theaters were not yet ready for use.

Draw a process diagram from buying your ticket to entering the screening of a movie.
Identify some techniques Event Cinemas could use to manage the waiting experience in this bottleneck. 

Servicescape - Istanbul Grand Bazaar

During 2011 Janet Sayers went to Istanbul for a conference and, with the help a friend, local Istanbuli Umut, and two friends from Auckland Uni, Rachel and Denise, we embarked on a shopping expedition to buy a leather jacket for Rachel's father. 

Rachel wanted to buy a leather jacket for her father, and the presentation records the interaction with the aim of describing the service-scape aspect of the encounter. Theories about place-scape and tourist-scapes are also relevant to interpreting this encounter, but this presentation is aimed at a general introduction to the service-scape concept and its relationship to service logic.

Managing Employees - Aesthetic Labour - Hale and Pace on 'Yorkshire Airlines'

Aesthetic labour is the labour people do through the way they look and behave. Managers and organisations actively manage this aspect of people's looks and behaviour. Airlines are a good example to illustrate this e.g. Air New Zealand, as national airlines are not only selling seats but also their country. 

The following Youtube video is a skit about 'Yorkshire Airlines' from the British 'Hale and Pace' television comedy series. This is an inspired skit about the fictitious Yorkshire Airlines 'style' of service. It pokes gentle fun at all things Yorkshire whilst at the same time parodying the trend for airlines to style their brand with the cultural features of their nation of origin. Parody works by exaggerating characteristics of its target, thereby enabling them to be seen more clearly by an audience. Note the features of Yorkshire airline's style that are the target of Hale and Pace's humour; greetings, look, accents and mannerisms of the cabin crew, onboard entertainment in first-class and economy class (that is a weasel the captain is pulling out of his pants as economy class entertainment), pilot preoccupations, toilet facilities, food service and so on. 

  

Moment of Truth - Illustrated with Toys for Surgical Visit

A Moment of Truth is a significant interaction point in a process where a customer makes a judgment as to the quality of the service they are experiencing.

Below you can see the result of a brief fun classroom activity where students* use toys to stand in for people (a patient, a doctor, a radiographer, and a receptionist). The five process points or Moments of Truth in this example are:
1. Arrival at reception
2. Wait
3. Radiographer
4. Doctor Consult
5. Payment at Reception

* Thanks to Connor and his team

Checklist - Quality as Conformance to Specification - Hotels and Japanese Trains

A Checklist is a simple method for checking that a process conforms to specifications. Checklists exist throughout service systems and are a common way to make sure there is conformance to a process. A checklist can also be seen as a simple 'job list' whose function is to reduce failure. The checklist is an aid for human memory and compensates for the human likelihood of attention drift.  Checklists help to ensure consistency and completeness in carrying out a task. A basic example is the 'to do list'.

For instance, below you can see a simple checklist for a cleaner cleaning a hotel room. The checklist ensures the hotel room is always clean and looks consistent with the hotel's requirements.

When I was in Japan recently I noticed that Japanese Train drivers always point at the instrument panel when they are driving. I was intrigued as to why this was. I learned that this practice has spread from Japan to other countries and is now an important method of preventing accidents and errors in a process. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling and https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2008/10/21/reference/jr-gestures/#.XVDxNOgzZaQ

Here you can see the pointing (also sometimes accompanied by calling) in action. 

Pareto Principle - Airlines

The Pareto Principle in business is an axiom of business management:  80% of sales come from 20% of clients.  An axiom is a statement that is taken to be true - and is the base of further arguments, although beware as it may not always be true! Generally speaking, the Pareto Principle is used in business to help managers understand that 20% of their clients are the most profitable. These are the repeat customers that use the higher end of a service - and so more attention needs to be paid to them. For instance, airlines recognize this principle by focusing resources on business customers by offering special services such as faster boarding, better seats, and lounges. This helps these customers remain loyal and impedes switching behavior.  

Pain Points

Pain points are another way of describing problems that prospective customers experience, or in other words, places in service where customers are dissatisfied. Pain points = dissatisfaction.  Like any problem, customer pain points are diverse and varied. Pain points are a useful alternative descriptor for dissatisfaction as they make it clear that dissatisfaction causes emotional and physical distress, and is not just an intellectual or psychological state of the customer. Calling dissatisfaction pain makes the necessity to resolve the pain more acute, urgent and critical to the health of the service organization. 

Scenario and Option Planning

Service managers need to consider options as part of what they do. This involves strategic thinking. One useful technique for strategic planning, especially when it involves creating options, is Scenario Planning.

If you follow this link it will take you to Adobe Connect where you can watch a brief 10 minute talk about Simplified Scenario or Option Planning, which can be used to analyze Case Studies, a common method of learning in business studies courses.

 To view the presentation click here.