Value versus Service

Do you prefer Value to Service?

Like many would say, both value and service are important to any organization that must continue to exist. Others could prefer value to service, while some would prefer going in the reverse. It is no news that every profit oriented business is created and funded so that shareholders may have dividends from their investments. Notwithstanding, this still does not totally stipulate that the business is existent because of the profit alone. It is the customers that bring the profit with their requests. When they don’t come, the profitability won’t come. This places the responsibility of looking for what would make the customers come on the management and every internal stakeholder of the business. In some organizations, employees who are seeing to add immediate value gets more reward compared with those that gradually and consistently contribute to the business. Should this be so? No, not at all! It is very good to recognize both the marketing and the operations staff who are meeting the customers’ needs, but with the right balance that would continue to favor customer service and not just one off high performance. Let’s think of a scenario where the customer is brought and there is no one with the professional capacity or technical knowhow to attend to his request. In this case, the customer will leave in annoyance and never to come back again.

Customers are the reason businesses exist and what they want to get is the service. When they get excellent service, they are sure to come back for more. However, organizations have continued to place more value on employees that seemingly brings the short term huge business rather than those who retain the not so big businesses that would stay for long. It is very true that without the huge businesses, profits might be limited, but it is also certain that when the huge businesses are not forthcoming, the not-so-big businesses that have been successfully retained would sustain the company. If they had not been retained and maintained, the result would have been very negative for the value proposition of the organization. One thing that should always be remembered is that, bringing a business can never equal retaining it. The ability to bring a business is just too small compared to that required to retain it. A business that is brought and not retained constitutes to only a short term benefit for the organization, whereas any business that is retained will continue to meet the profit speculation of shareholders. So which one would you say should be strategically pursued? It is better to look at service as most important. Hence, as management reward value adding employees, service excellence should also get the commendation from the top executives.

Conclusively, service is the reason why the customer visited in the first place. If the customer learns that service cannot be rendered as expected, the business or transaction request is taken to any available alternative solution provider. Monthly performance report sessions of profit oriented organizations should adapt their focus to catering for sessions that would evaluate what their businesses has to offer the customers. Customers won’t come to tell you what they need if you don’t care to ask them. One way these customers would be sure that your company cares about good service is to see that the employees that serve them are happy and knowledgeable about what they do. This calls for employee motivation. According to Hezberg, key components of service like employee achievement, employee recognition for achievement, interest in tasks, responsibility for enlarged tasks and growth and advancements to higher tasks can all be described as motivational factors (Adewusi, 2011). These factors produce long term positive increase in productivity and would eventually add more value to the business. Unlike the immediate value that is achievable from huge businesses brought in without a certainty of its retention with the organization.