Service Excellence
Ensuring That Quality and Efficiency Underpin Our Pursuit of Customer Satisfaction
Score: 91.1%
week of:
November 17, 2008.
There is nothing hit-or-miss about delivering excellent service. It is EDS' primary differentiator in the information technology (IT) marketplace. Our Service Excellence program underpins our relentless pursuit of customer satisfaction. Our objectives are simple: 100 percent client satisfaction and 100 percent client retention.
Innovative and bold, yet in use for more than eight years, our Service Excellence approach embraces open, candid and collaborative relationships with our clients. These two words – service excellence – are part of the vocabulary and culture of the entire company.
Service Excellence Dashboard
The Service Excellence Dashboard is the centerpiece of the program. We use this Web-enabled, real-time information system to monitor the quality of services we deliver to more than 700 active clients. This tool is especially useful to our executives, who receive client summaries and bulletins or alerts, which keep them up to date at all times. Our stoplight icon and red-yellow-green scoring are simple to understand and consistently used across the globe. This highly visual method transcends language barriers and provides an instant "quick picture" of the state of the client relationship.
By using a private, customized view of the dashboard – the Service Excellence Client Dashboard – clients can check on their status and provide real-time feedback to EDS support teams directly from their desktops. Plus, they can initiate a survey process whenever they want and invite any participants they feel deserve a vote on EDS' performance rating. While some IT services providers might shy away from this degree of openness, we find it a powerfully effective method of understanding the needs of the clients and ensuring we act accordingly and deliver on our commitments to meet their expectations.
Taking Action
At EDS, providing outstanding service, innovation and industry thought leadership is key to our continued leadership position in IT delivery services. Service Excellence means not only delivering on commitments, but exceeding client expectations – consistently. It means being the most cost-effective at delivering high-value services with industry-leading quality. At EDS, Service Excellence is an essential element of our continuing plan to build the premier global outsourcing services company. It is central to our focus on client loyalty.
Voice of the Client
Ultimately, the client's rating of EDS' performance is the only score that really counts. By using the dashboard, clients can weigh in at any given time about our performance and their level of satisfaction. This presents EDS with opportunities to continually satisfy the client. Annually, EDS surveys more than 2,000 executives within 700 client companies. We conduct in-person interviews with more than 500 executives within our top 150-175 client organizations. This level of client feedback is unsurpassed in the industry.
We're Listening
At EDS, client satisfaction and delivery excellence are our top priorities. That's why we've turned up the volume on client feedback with the Voice of the Client (VoC) program. By improving the lines of communication between clients and EDS, we are better able to evaluate our performance, identify growth opportunities, understand how our clients perceive us and gain insight about how our performance compares with our competitors.
Client Dashboard
EDS clients have round-the-clock access to performance information by accessing the Service Excellence Client Dashboard via the Internet. With this tool, clients are able to provide direct feedback to their client executive (and others), ask questions and make suggestions for improvement. This private, customized view of EDS' internal performance monitoring system is just one more innovative way of building the trust we need to maximize relationships and succeed in today's highly competitive world.
Clients also have the ability to initiate surveys from the Client Dashboard. Client administrators are able to initiate a survey, add survey participants, and take a survey in e-mail and Web formats, providing direct real-time client feedback to EDS leadership.
Client Surveys
EDS puts client feedback squarely in the hands of our clients with client surveys. These online surveys eliminate red tape, enabling our clients to submit real-time performance evaluations directly to responsible EDS parties. Clients are encouraged to submit at least one survey per year. Surveys available in 14 languages and include a set of 22 standard questions. Additionally, clients may also choose to complete a paper survey in one of 18 languages.
In 2008, Service Excellence will introduce a revised survey with new questions along with a more efficient survey administration process. The VoC expanded question sets promise to give EDS deeper insight into its clients down to the service offering level, thereby increasing the overall value of the feedback.
Client Interviews
The Service Excellence VoC Interview Program enables EDS to capture client perceptions and expectations regarding EDS' teams, products and services in a one-on-one interview. This feedback is used to improve customer satisfaction at the client level, as well as provide key input to EDS business improvement initiatives and overall EDS service excellence objectives. Client interviews are face-to-face discussions between an independent representative from the Service Excellence team and three to five client representatives, including CXOs and other key decision-makers. These candid one-hour interviews include open-ended questions about EDS' performance, deliverables and service quality as well as past disappointments, expectations and future objectives.
Each time a client provides feedback, EDS has the opportunity to improve delivery, build trust and demonstrate our ability to provide solutions to our clients. When feedback is received through a survey or interview, EDS leaders are required to complete an action plan and post that plan on the Service Excellence Dashboard.
Client Feedback Facilitation Workshop
The Client Feedback Facilitation Workshop (CFFW) is an in-depth examination of the client's expectations. The CFFW is an objective, third-party facilitated discussion that enables key clients and the EDS team to come together to make consensus-based decisions about priorities and their implementation for improvement. In short, it promotes open communications and action planning. The final deliverables of the CFFW are documented actions, responsibilities and milestones based on the discussion and the clients' expectations.
Perspectives
In the complex world of information technology services, addressing key business functions such as client loyalty, customer relationship management and process reengineering is an especially tough challenge. EDS has stepped up to this challenge in a way that distinguishes us from all competitors.
Our Service Excellence program has created new frontiers of learning in enterprise transformation and performance management practices. What we've done to achieve this marketplace advantage is fairly simple, yet bold. By opening the door to our clients for candid, collaborative dialogue, we’re able to stay far ahead of the curve in measuring and anticipating clients needs, desires and possibilities.
At the center of our program is a Web-enhanced tool called the Service Excellence Dashboard. This critical tool provides senior leaders with fast, unfiltered access to performance information from our client-facing teams, various performance measurement systems and the client themselves. We use this information to cut through potential bureaucratic hurdles and quickly address client issues quickly, before they become problems.
From their desktops, our clients use a customized version of the dashboard to monitor EDS performance and offer their perspectives. At any time clients can also activate surveys and invite participants to give more structured feedback. This information is reviewed at the highest levels within EDS, action plans are put in place, then we execute to meet and exceed the client’s expectations.
The Service Excellence program is instrumental to our success in cultivating and maintaining long-term business relationships. It has become for a catalyst for cultural change within EDS. Our employees rally their collective knowledge to address clients’ business issues today and anticipate those which loom ahead in the fast-changing IT market.
Take a few moments to learn more about the EDS Service Excellence program and share your ideas with us through our online polls or e-mails to Tracy Gilman, EDS Global Operations director of Service Excellence. In today’s business environment service quality and client relationships are key to sustained business success.