Introduction

In a world of change and high competition, organizations are confronted with permanently growing and evolving customer expectations. To be successful in a sustainable way, organizations must deliver excellent service and promote outstanding customer experiences to delight their customers. This is the main objective of service excellence. Service excellence is one of the main prerequisites to organizational success and becoming a market leader. Organizations should possess strategies, processes, technologies, tools, systems, staff and organizational structures enabling the management of current and changing customer needs and expectations.

Organizations should develop, implement and manage service excellence initiatives. This will lead to outstanding customer experiences, cost effectiveness and improved organizational efficiency.

Along the entire service value chain, organizations, including suppliers, outsourcers and other partners, should measure service excellence performance.

This document provides a set of approaches that can be used to measure service excellence performance, particularly those factors with the greatest impact on improving outstanding customer experiences and customer delight.

To determine that service excellence is effective it is imperative that the performance measurement system is aligned with the organization’s service excellence model. This ensures that measuring processes are fit for their intended use and allows service excellence activities to be monitored and measured against the service excellence objectives.

ISO 23592 specifies the service excellence terminology, principles and model to achieve outstanding customer experience and sustainable customer delight. Consequently, the corresponding measurement system should relate to all the four dimensions and nine elements of the service excellence model (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 — Service excellence model

The clauses in this document elaborate on the requirements of the element “Monitoring service excellence activities and results” within the dimension “Operational service excellence” of the service excellence model located in ISO 23592.

While all four dimensions of the service excellence model should be measured, measurement is focused on the upper two levels of the service excellence pyramid (see Figure 2), specifically, the “individual excellent service provision” (Level 3) and the “surprisingly excellent service provision” (Level 4) that contribute to customer delight and, subsequently, improved financial or non-financial results.

Figure 2 — Service excellence pyramid

ISO 23592 requires that the organization develops and systematically uses a set of internal and external metrics focused on all elements of the service excellence model and measures the successful achievement of levels three and four of the pyramid.

It is important to note the differences in measures required for customer satisfaction (levels 1 and 2) and those required for customer delight (levels 3 and 4). Customer delight cannot be achieved without the foundations of customer satisfaction. Due to these interdependencies, it is incumbent upon an organization to ensure the selection of the appropriate measures that distinguish between customer satisfaction and delight.

PD ISO/TS 23686:2022

Service excellence. Measuring service excellence performance

Current, Under Review

Published:

31 Oct 2022

1 Scope