Complexity in designing an impeccable service

I learned some management and life lessons in my recent trip to Halong Bay, Vietnam.  I took a local two-day-1-night cruise at Halong Bay. It was a very enjoyable vacation.

There are three basic components in the cruise that provide comfort and enjoyment to me during the cruise.

(i) Scenery - most people go to Halong Bay for its unique scenery.  This is the environment more or less uncontrollable  independent of the cruise one takes;

(ii)  Operating company of the cruise which provides the hardware including the ship itself, the operating logistics and support such as programs, the food, registration process, the convenience, sense of security and so on;

(iii) Front-line staffs who actually perform the services during the cruise.

I highly rated the scenery. It is just magnificent.   For number (ii) the company, it got high rating from me too. The registration and waiting room before embarkation are of 5-star, high class private club like with its own private prier. It is far way from the crowds.  The company has a good name in the industry and owns several well maintained ships. The staterooms are large, luxurious, clean and well equipped. 

Halong Bay and Honoi area was part of the communist regime.  Such cultural background does not land itself to good services.  So the front-line service can be better.  Small nuisances like missing utensils at the dining table, lukewarm coffee, delays in program schedule, impolite and arrogant managers. 

In short, (i) external environment - excellent; (ii) the company - excellent; (iii) service - poor.

In traditional manufacturing, the interface between division of work is precise and can be clearly defined. The "distance" from a designer to a customer is large. The same is true for the distance between a production unit and a customer. The concerns in manufacturing are low cost, product reliability, and product usability. These clear and well designed interfaces are needed to produce millions of products and are essential for out-sourcing.

In service industry, on the other hand, there is no distance between customers and service people. The back-office, the supporting logistics and the front-line serving staffs are an integrated whole. The interfaces are complicated and changing. It is almost impossible to clearly define the line between one functional group to another. A good service company must integrate the many variations of processes in a real-time and immediate responding customer needs. The workers need to be high quality knowledge workers. The company must implement communication, logistics support, alarm and reporting, knowledgeable beyond his/her functions supervisors. Take the case of the Halong Bay cruise. The back-office should know exactly the quantity of utensils required. They should know immediately there was a lack of Tai-chi coach to fulfill the program requirement.  High-quality front-line + real time support back-end are essential.

Thus I concluded, a good service company must be a well integrated tightly-knitted entity. The complexity comes, if the company (i) has a broad service range; (ii) reduce back-office process man-power and delays; (iii) reduce front-line influence of adversity. This is trading front-line complexity (costly serving personnels) with supporting back-end offices and logistics. By moving the remote front-end to internal controllable back-end. 

I will address the issue of service automation based on the above observation.

Complexity and choice

Choices and decision
Marketing people knows too well that when customers are given too many choices, they become indecisive because the decision making process is becoming too complex for them. Have you ever go to a shop that sells consumer type digital cameras or that sells mobile phones or that sells TV sets? You will experience the difficulties in making an intelligent choice. 


In consumer product designIn electronics product design, a market follower adds extra functionalities and lower the price to gain market share from the product leader. Examples are plenty, the ebooks, the phones and cameras. These product designers are too lazy to really find out what the customers want. The way to avoid feature overload is to set a limit on the number of features on the device. Apple is a product leader and has stubbornly set feature limits. In so doing, the engineers (or designers) have to make the features easy to use. One cannot rely on features as a selling point.


The Y-gen not knowing what they want
In the society, the young people are offered 10 millions choices. They have no power of independent judgement. Yet, the socialists, the educators and the parents insist not to guide guidelines to them. 


Education do not include knowing right and wrongI talked to a Business School professor on business ethics recently. He insisted that educators should not make ethical decisions for the students. True! The students, when they graduate and become professionals, they should make their own ethical decisions. But it is our duty and responsibilities to tell them what is right and what is wrong. The decisions are they to make. The real joke is, the professors in this school insist "profit maximization" is right. On the one hand, they do not want to tell students what is right and wrong and on the other hand tell the students to go and maximize profit which we all (non-professors) know to days sad situation is partially some people makes too much profit.