Recently I was honoured to be asked to talk to the Sligo Tech Meet-up. It was a great evening with a lot of interesting folk there. I have finally gotten round to sharing the slides.
As part of the talk I went through how I had gotten to where I was – some of the hiccups and some of the funny dalliances. There was the security auditor finding the passwords and usernames written on white stickers attached to the firewalls. There was the case of the electrical wiring error that blew the power units in a national financial institution. All these were disasters, but not catastrophic. In fact they are quite amusing at this stage.
What is catastrophic though is a loss of your service’s integrity. Accountants deal with this as a Goodwill balancing figure. Call centre managers aim to achieve a Net Promoter Score. CTO/Operations Manager’s use indices like Mean Time Between Failure and robustness calculations. All these are trying to quantify a good service.
There is a fallacy that if you have an internet business you do not need good service standards. That is rubbish. It may no longer be the obsequious shop clerk, but a system that is up is part of a good service. An intuitive interface is part of a good service. A timely set of communications is part of a good service (check out appeer.io for how to do communications well). If you didn’t get it, I believe service is central to what we all do.
Have a look at the presentation and I hope you enjoy it.