In my view, I feel delivering and demanding excellence are two sides of the same coin. If you practice excellence thinking and action, great that is not enough. At the same time, you should also "demand excellence" in whatever services you procure and use.

Let me give a recent example that our firm encountered of unacceptable quality of services and the way we responded to it.

Here was an advertising company through which we were promoting our company offerin

gs. The sales persons from the company gave a nice presentation, the contract got signed up, advanced paid, information about our company was provided to them to include in their promotional website. We waited a couple of days and checked out if our company info was put up fine. There were numerous mistakes, telephone numbers wrong, e-mail ids incorrectly shown, grade of package we had taken and what was showing up was very different so on and so forth. As a buyer of the advertising service, we put in a note through the contact e-mail, but no response for a few days.

We next reached out to the regional in-charge and sent in detailed information of the deficiencies, some of the errors got corrected, still quite a few points were left unattended.

The next level of intimation from our end was directly to their CEO. On this escalation, everything got corrected and made "perfect" within 24 hours and three VPs spoke to us

"assuring it is always their intention to provide good service".

While intentions of most organizations and people therein are generally good, this experience clearly reflects thorough lack of processes within the service provider, poor definition of work standards and hand-offs between sales and service delivery function and obviously clear lack of responsibility and process definition of how work should flow from enquiry / order till fulfillment and service delivery.

I also know another company who had similar problem with this service provider, however they are still struggling to get it sorted out. Our firm could have sat tight and waited for "things to happen", however the urge to "demand excellence" made us reach out to the person (the CEO!!) who can best resolve our issue and set things right quickly.

In the bargain, our company's promotional period has now been extended by one more month entirely free of cost as we protested that the contract period can only start when "correct" information about our company is visible in the advertising platform!!

It is my personal (and professional) view that those who don't DEMAND excellence for the money they spend can NEVER become a professional who can truly DELIVER excellence. After all, if you are spending money and tolerating nonsense, what incentive do you have to deliver excellence to others - isn't it?

So, learn to not only deliver excellence but also demand excellence. And if you run out of options, reach out to the CEO. For sure your problem WILL GET RESOLVED in lightning speed !!

BTW - If you deliver poor service, also keep in mind that your customer will reach your CEO to get it set right. The excellence knife cuts both ways!!

Feel free to post your comments and experience!!

Sethu V

eXample Consulting Group

(Enabling Excellence!!)

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