customer may be always right--but who is the customer?, The

Modern business theory has it that a business exists for only one purpose, to serve the customer. The same principle is true of subsections of an organisation, giving rise to the expression "internal customer." If you don't please your customer, the customer will leave, your business will collapse, or the organisation will seek ways of outsourcing the task. So the conventional wisdom has it. But what if you are a monopoly supplier of a service, and it is one that the person who pays the bills often doesn't even want to know about? What if you are a records manager?

In the jargon of today's business world one of the key expressions is "quality assurance." Quality assurance, as a function, has its own terminology, and one of the terms is "customer service." Everything in business must be subordinated to meeting the needs of the customer. Meeting those needs, in turn, requires them to be identified and requires that, somehow, both the needs and their achievement be quantified. Not an easy task. The records and archives professions have a number of customer groups, whose needs are not identical and may at times be in conflict. These customers include: The people who come into your organisation seeking information.

The people who require you to keep information (your company or the government). Yourself (records and archives organisations, like some scientific fields, often keep information for its own sake. That being so, you are the customer as well as the custodian). Future generations who may want or need the information. People who "own" the information you hold, such as an originating government department, or a group which has deposited material with you. Given all these customers, where do you start to serve them? How do you know you are providing an adequate level of service, "adequate" being defined as the level of service which they expect and may well be entitled to?

How, in fact, do you measure a records management service? Presumably you start by identifying your customers and then move on to determining their wants, expectations and needs. INFORMATION SEEKERS

It is not unfair to suggest that records management is no different than any other business activity. People who seek information from your records organisation are those who get the most attention, if only because they tend to be the most urgent in their demands. Their needs are also likely to be the ones most often in conflict with the needs of the other "customers." But their needs will set the standard of service for your records section, albeit unintentionally. The better you provide for their needs, the fewer problems and difficulties will arise with your managers-who are likely to be fairly happy provided everyone else is happy.

WHO PAYS THE BILLS? The people who pay your wages, in theory, should get the best, or most, service. In practice, they may have little need for some of your services at all. With a few exceptions, the company per se has relatively little long-term use for records, and recognises only that they must be kept for protection against future law suits, to satisfy various regulatory agencies, to assuage the tax collector, etc. There are plenty of short-term (say up to ten years) business needs for records, but fewer long-term ones. Hence, the person who pays the bills is frequently not a customer for your records. This is an issue of customer service that may never be resolved. How can a service be delivered to a customer who doesn't realise he needs it-and obtain uncompromising loyalty in the process?

It is my view that the only way that you are likely to get the support you need for your records organisation from top management is to establish yourself a reputation. Flattery works, even on CEOs, and a CEO told at a cocktail party by the company lawyer just how good his records service is will believe it and be proud of it-just the sort of thing that could lead to minimizing your budget cuts.

Cynical that may be, but the fact is that some customers can only be pleased by association; you cannot please them directly. You serve them only by being faithful to your disciplines and ensuring that the company, and by association, the managers, are not brought into disrepute.

PROFESSIONALISM

That leads us to the next "customer," yourself. Part of what you want to provide to yourself is personal and professional integrity. Let me offer an example from outside the discipline.

Suppose you are a seller of rope. You know, because you are technically competent, precisely what sort of rope is needed to make a safe backyard swing. It needs strength, not too much stretch under a given load, minimum chafe in the areas of contact with the frame and the seat, and the ability to last for a long time rather than rotting when it has had a couple of seasons in the rain. A customer comes in, and wants some cheap rope "for a simple swing for the kids." Your professional integrity will not allow you to sell him cheap rope, you will sell him the right stuff or none at all. Your integrity may make you miss out on a sale.

A records manager's problem with customers may be similar. There are professional standards in all areas and a service to be given to all customers, even those who do not fully understand what they are asking. For example, suppose you have an archive which must also be used to meet today's records needs. The question is, how can your operation meet these needs, other customers requirements, and your own professional standards, all the while keeping costs down? Your boss wants close stack storage for economic reasons, other customers want free and open access to documents, and you need security, fire safety and proper storage environments. Customers want instant photocopies of fragile and faded documents from your archives. You want to "protect" the documents. Your integrity can create problems that you can well do without.

There is a triple dilemma. You wish, and indeed need, to serve your customer over the counter, your professionalism constrains some of the service customers might like, and finally, especially if you are an archivist, the owner or depositor will frequently put his or her own conditions on it, which may include denial of access for whatever reason, or conversely allow open access which creates other dilem

Nothing is easy, especially not yet born whose needs you consider that there is a fifth guess. The need to probably an item yet born, whose needs of years cou have to second today and possibly gives rise need to keep an item for need for duplicate or more of years constrains its use today and possibly gives rise with both customers. It also need for duplicate or more second guessing their needs, and anyone with both customers. It also involves secords of a hundred guessing their needs, and that those old-time arching records of a hundred years ago recognises weren't really those old-time adtoo much of the future managers and archivists were in really thing handwriting in too much of the future bound books. they wrote in appalling have been thinking of keeping records, but probably not of massive bound books. They may have been that was the technology of keeping the day, and one cords, but probably not of using

But that was the techno make sense of the day, technology. So records mand one could equally shudder at the to find a way of people in ing hundred years' time, customer even teds in time, trying to come. Yes, we sense better than we used technology. So be, there is more logic in the systems, there is need to find a way of measuring hypothetical customer needs in times to come. Ye discipline, all those are better things, but are we capable to be, there is more ing beyond today's technologic in the systems, there is better documentation, somer needs consistency across the discipline, all those good things, but are we capable of thinking beyond today's technology to customer needs of tomorrow? I've asked a lot more questions than I have answers for, but all the issues are real and relate to coming to grips with who a customer is, and what that customer wants and needs. I leave this part of the article with the thought that the aim of any service industry is to identify its customers and take all possible steps to "delight" them. QUALITY EVALUATION

I would like to offer a few thoughts from the perspective of a person with a bit of knowledge of archives, a bit more of records management, a recently acquired interest and involvement in genealogy, and some skills in the quality area.

There are a lot of ways of evaluating service. Some things are easily measurable and some less so. It is important to measure what you can measure. For example, what is the average delay in providing a file from remote storage? That should be easy to measure, yet the answer may raise a series of other challenges. Is the delay changing over time? Is it worse on certain days of the week? Does it vary with weather conditions, etc.? And, what does the customer want or need? Have you ever asked?

There is often a gap between what you think your customers want and what your customers actually want. The management of a certain airline decided to improve its service level and moved heaven and earth to ensure that their aircraft arrived on time. Then a customer survey indicated that passengers would accept certain reasonable delays; their priority was to not be separated from their luggage. The airline changed its priorities-and started to grow! Having identified your customers, how can you best serve them? Not by giving them what you think they want, but rather what they want.

A warehousing organisation had a standard of performance for delivery of items ex stock within 21 days. Anyone complaining was told, "You got it in less than 21 days; that's our standard." To be fair, they were consistent in achieving this standard; there was a high level of reliability. But the customer's method of dealing with the problems this created was to make all sorts of priority demands, pleas for special handling, etc. This gave rise to massive increases in workload for the warehouse, which was forever breaching its own systems to deal with the demands. An enlightened new manager thought, Why can't we try to give the customers what they want rather than what we say they can have? Within 3 months of trying this approach, the time for delivery had been reduced from an average of eighteen days to a maximum of three days, using less staff-because the complaints and specials and priorities had all gone away. It was all achieved with targets and measurement and working out what customers wanted as opposed to what the business was prepared to give them. It is a fundamental precept of quality, as it is understood today, that quality is rarely a cost. Quality is frequently a saving and invariably a competitive advantage! But what customer actually knows precisely what he or she wants? They know what they don't want after they have been given what you thought they asked for, but they often are unable to state their precise needs specifically. "Quick as you can, but if you take too long you'll know all about it" seems to be the average customer definition of service. So you have to do a lot of work to determine what customer needs are. There is little benefit in really working hard to give an instant turn around of work when the customer is quite happy with two or three hours. So don't be fooled into thinking that you are providing a better service because you have shortened your delivery time. It is only better if the customer actually has a use for it.

More to the point, it is often the way customers feel about your service that determines your success or failure. That has little to do with what you actually provide. And how do you measure the immeasurable?

The questionnaire is the obvious method, and questionnaires have their place. But too often they don't ask questions that lead to action and don't provide an adequate comparison. "Did you get the file you wanted in a reasonable time? Yes/No" doesn't actually tell you anything. What does reasonable mean? Something quite different for every person who answered, you can be sure. And if the answer is "No," what information is given that will enable you to improve the position? None, unless someone has uncharacteristically provided a whole lot of written explanation.

So questionnaires need to be targeted at real situations and written in such a way that action can be taken as a result. The key question is, "If we have failed in any way, how did we fail and how can we correct it?" How long should we take to provide your information if we are to provide for your real needs and wants? How long did we take?

There are several relatively easily applied techniques which can be used to provide some measurement of how you are going. I will discuss four of them: The "Secret Shopper" Benchmarking ServQual "Gap" model Service Level Agreements. The "Secret Shopper" One way to assess service quality is to arrange for people to make "dummy inquiries" by asking a prepared question to which the correct answer is known so that the response can be evaluated against it. This is widely accepted technique is known in the retail trade as the "secret shopper." There are a few ethical questions to be answered about it in the context of services such as records and archives, as well as in the retail industry, but there is a bigger problem than that. The "secret shopper" type of approach targets one or a few staff members, in the public counter area only. It is well established, however, that only about ten percent of quality failures can be attributed to an individual; the remainder are created by what is loosely called "the system." Suppose the outcome of our secret inquiry is that the staff member couldn't locate the required indexes. That's a fault, a failure. What it doesn't tell us is that there is only one copy of it, that it was out the back being brought up to date, and that the staff member in question had just come on duty and hadn't seen it being taken out. The "system" had failed both the staff member and the enquirer.

My suggestion is rather to introduce an "expert panel." You might establish a panel of, say, ten frequent users, who are willing to sit down two or three times a year over morning coffee with you and your staff to discuss issues of customer service. They will not be "secret shoppers;" they will be well known to the staff as regular customers and members of the panel. They will be "flies on the wall" and will hear comments of other customers such as "I didn't get quite what I wanted," or "I haven't got time to wait in the queue any longer" or "they really need two copies of that index." They will be able to suggest that the records staff should be more conscious of the needs of certain groups of people, such as students on small budgets and restricted hours, managers who need information for breakfast meetings, disabled people, etc. You'll get very sound information from this sort of group discussion.

You can learn a great deal about what is going on in your organisation by simply sitting and watching. Use some of your frequent customers to do this "sitting and watching," and you are likely to be amazed at how much you didn't know.

And because the people on your panel may be knowledgeable about other types of records systems, they can also help you to benchmark. Benchmarking

Benchmarking is one of the most powerful tools known for improving an organisation. It has been known and used since the beginning of time and is a natural thing to do. A six-year-old who comes home from school and asks why he can't have a lunch as nice as the one Mary's mother made is benchmarking. But benchmarking has only recently been established as a formal management technique. Put very simply, it is a comparative system and can be numeric or not as suits your needs.

You can ask your expert panel how other people do certain things. Is it better or worse than your performance? You can also benchmark yourself against another similar organisation, records managers in other branches of your business, or in other businesses. What methods do each of you use to achieve a certain purpose? A flowchart from each area is a good start, then perhaps a round robin of visits or a conference telephone call to pick the best out of all systems. How many staff do you each have to carry out X number of transactions? How long is the waiting time? Why the differences? How can we take the best of the best and thus drag ourselves upwards? Are there differences in approach by different customers? (We've already noted that at least part of a customer problem is that the customers are poorly educated in what to expect from a records section.) Maybe someone has done work on this.

And you can benchmark yourself against dissimilar organisations which may have something to offer you.

The classic example being talked about these days is American Airlines, which matched their tarmac crews against pit crews in the Indianapolis 500. How were the teams organised, directed, equipped, etc?

Another recent one is the United States Marines, who benchmarked their decision-making techniques against those of some members of the New York Stock Exchange. Sounds strange but when you think about it, the similar characteristics are sound and fury, vast amounts of information in electronic form delivered constantly, instant decisions or you've missed out, and so on.

Who might you benchmark yourself against? And in what way? It can be numbers, it can be procedures, or even simple observation. Swap a couple of staff members for a week or two, then make use of what they have learned during that exchange. This can lead you to exchange statistics with a better understanding of what lies behind them. ServQual

Unlike benchmarking, which compares the same or similar processes in different organisations, ServQual is a highly structured methodology to measure the differences in expectation and outcome between the different parties in the activity. Such parties could be you, your staff, your management, your customers and so on. It is a formal approach which can embrace all customers and as many other interested parties as you wish. The technique is our old friend the questionnaire. The main aim is to find the "gaps."

There are almost certainly gaps between what customers are led to expect from your advertising and general public image and what you are capable of providing and can actually provide.

Because staff are in the firing line and management often is not, there are gaps between what managers think customers want, what staff think customers want, what customers think they want, and what management thinks staff are capable of providing. The ServQual methodology has a standard set of questions which can be customised to meet specific needs. The idea is that you first ask people (managers, staff, clients) what they expect of your records section, such as "A good records section will have bright airy premises." Is this important to you? You then repeat the questionnaire, but rewritten so that it applies to your records section, thus "The XXX records section has bright airy premises. Yes/No."

This methodology can be repeated as many times as you like, with as many questions as you can dream up. The outcome is identification of the relative importance of various issues to each of the parties and the extent to which your particular work area actually lives up to expectations. The "gaps" between expectation and performance provide the indicators of what needs to be addressed, either because performance is not up to expectations, or it is too high, that is, you are putting a lot of effort into something which is not valued. Service Level Agreements Service level agreements are another very old "new" idea. An internal service level agreement is really a way for large organisations to document the outcome of a definition of customer needs. You reach a conclusion that what your customer needs is an hourly mail round, the ability to order a file, say, by phone and receive it on the next mail round provided the call is 10 minutes or more prior to the round, and so on. That means that you can budget quite precisely to provide that agreed level of service, while clients know that they can depend on it totally. Everyone, including the boss who pays the bills but doesn't use the service, knows where he or she stands.

You claim to need more resources to do your job. Why? Because Department XXX wishes to change the service level agreement which will require you to do certain additional things, or do what you are doing now more quickly. Guess who is going to be asked to pay some of the costs of that extra service?

The with the current issues outlined deal ef customer service. In many with the current issues of cusshort-term and long-term service. In many cases the short-term and long-term identical, but to deal with the ongoing needs of a records identical, but to deal with the technical excellence is critical to a records system effective approach. excellence is critical to an effective approach. immediate needs of provide for the immediate customer but can compromise the longer the counter" customer but can compromise the longer ter what today's customer wants, in the long ter what today's customer wants, in the key to ensuring term, professionalism is the key to current and future clients that both current and from your pre clients can If any organisation value from your present-day about customer service, it must.

If all its customers, find organisation is serious they want, and work out customer service, it must idenpossible way to serve them. The its customers, find out what they want, compromises of demand work out the best possible ween different groups of custo serve them. The inevitable compromises of demand be dealt with by good public tween different groups of customerior service, and an can only be approach to seealt with by good public customer opinions, superior service, and providing it to aggressive best of your approach to seeking out customer opinion and providing it to the best of your ability.

REFERENCE

If you want to find out more about ServQual, you may care to read the definitive text on the subject:

Parasuraman, A.; Zeithaml, V.A.; and Berry, L.L., Delivering Quality ServicesBalancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations. The Free Press, 1990.

AUTHOR: Fraser J. Boyd started his working life in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a photographer. After some 18 years he sought a career change and trained as an industrial engineer, a discipline in which he has practiced since 1975. Records management is one area in which he has developed a particular interest as part of methods improvement work in a range of applications in the New Zealand Defense Forces. He has recently also been given responsibility for development and application of quality assurance policy.

Copyright Association of Records Managers and Administrators Inc. Apr 1997
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