Achieving Operational Excellence won’t happen overnight, but it won’t take years or decades either.  There are two major steps that, done correctly in the beginning, will enable us to “jump” to Operational Excellence.  These steps are:

1. Establishing a destination.
2. Building a roadmap to that destination.

We spoke about the destination in the last blog post last week, if you haven’t read it, probably a good idea to glance it through! No to the roadmap…

Once we’ve taught each employee to think the same way about continuous improvement and Operational Excellence, we can start on the more practical side of achieving Operational Excellence by building a roadmap.

Just think of it this way:  companies that know where they are going will simply get there faster, and companies that achieve Operational Excellence will grow their businesses by taking market share – most likely from those who don’t.

The basis for the road map is to obtain consistency, something that the spa business isn’t famous for. In all industries, it takes attention to detail, it takes a combined effort, it takes training, sometimes it takes inspection and testing, and it always takes a real commitment to Quality.

In the Spa industry all of these things are more difficult because we lock our customer in a room with our employee and hope all goes well and our client is happy. Once we have consistency – which is essential service, then we can build excellence.

The three main weapons we have to achieve consistency are:

1. Standard Operational Procedures
2. Training
3. Evaluating & Testing

The Research Institute of America, which conducted a study for the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, sheds some light on the devastating consequences of poor customer service:

• The average business will hear nothing from 96% of unhappy customers who receive rude or discourteous treatment.
• 90% of those who are dissatisfied with the service they receive will not come back or buy again.
• Each of those unhappy customers will tell their story to at least nine other people, and 13% will relate their tales of woe to over 20 people.
• For every complaint received, the average company has 26 customers with problems, six of which they consider serious problems.
• Only 4% of unhappy customers bother to complain. For every complaint you hear, 24 others go un-communicated to your company, but not un-communicated to other potential customers.

So get out there an achieve operational excellence!!!

//Anna