“Is there really a difference between ‘striving for service excellence’ and ‘problem-solving’? Aren’t they really the same? Isn’t it just ‘semantics’?” Not for me! For me, ‘striving for service excellence’ means focusing on deeply understanding each customer and then creating – and delivering – the peak services that meet their needs now and for the long-term. It’s an active – and forward-looking – process. Problem-solving, on the other hand, tends to focus on fixing things that don’t seem to be going right – or turning out as we planned – reactively – now. It’s also easy for problem-solving to become internally focused, because as human beings, we tend to see things from our own point of view. So, if you’re a service organization (and all organizations are!), take a few minutes to think about whether your customers would prefer you to focus on problem-solving only or also on striving towards service excellence!
