At your service: Government allots $84m to boost service excellence

This is after 7,800 establishments and 183,000 workers were said to have benefited from Customer-Centric Initiative projects.

According to a release, enterprises in the services sector can expect a boost for their service excellence efforts. An additional $84 million has been committed by the Go-the-Extra-Mile-for-Service Up committee for service capability development efforts. This focuses on helping companies embark on Customer-Centric Initiative, or CCI projects and to train their service staff. Mr Lim Swee Say, Minister, Prime Minister’s Office, made this announcement at the fifth anniversary of Singapore’s service excellence movement at the CCI Symposium.

Minister Lim also announced that WDA will be launching a suite of service innovation training programmes for the workforce later this week. This suite of programmes will enable organisations to adopt a whole company approach towards transforming the customer experience.

The Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore (CSISG) model would also be further localised to suit the Singapore service sector. For shopping malls and their tenants, the Customer Satisfaction Index for Shopping Malls would be further ramped up to reach out to more malls so as to benefit the industry.

Mr Lee Yi Shyan, Minister of State for Trade & Industry and National Development, shared the achievements of the service excellence movement over the last five years. Introduced in 2005 to elevate companies’ service levels, CCI has been well received by the service sector.

CCI was launched in the retail sector and since then has extended its reach to the food and beverage, healthcare, land transport, hospitality and travel sectors. Some 7,800 establishments and 183,000 workers have to-date benefitted from CCI, which is about 50 per cent of establishments and workers across the six sectors.

Four Service Excellence Icons - Changi Airport, Ion Orchard, Sentosa and Wing Tai Retail - were unveiled in the past year to share service breakthroughs with their industry counterparts. The icons were selected for their far-reaching impact on, and level of personalised service for, guests. These icons have each won international or regional accolades. Three new icons will be identified in the years ahead to further spearhead Singapore’s service excellence journey.

Companies have generally shown an improvement in service quality. The CSISG showed that perceived service quality improved from 70.4 points in 2007 to 71.3 points in 2010.

CCI companies have also shown that service excellence does lead to an increase in the bottom line. An impact study conducted by the National University of Singapore in 2009 reported that CCI companies in the retail and F&B industries outperformed their counterparts by an average of 45 per cent in terms of sales growth.

Soo Kee Jewellery Group was one company that demonstrated increases in bottom line and productivity. The company implemented a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and organised frequent customer focus groups to collect customer feedback. The CRM system greatly allowed marketing efforts to be targeted at, and matched to, the different needs of its customer segments.

Coupled with streamlined operational processes from fine-tuning its service blueprints, Soo Kee Jewellery experienced a more than 20 per cent increase in productivity. In sales, Soo Kee’s overall profitability also improved by nearly 60 per cent in 2010.

Alliance Healthcare introduced a proprietary e-health platform system to provide its patients access to their personal health portal and monitor their conditions online at their convenience. The company has also implemented a Phone Q and SMS system to cut down on patient queue-waiting time.

Patients who first call the clinic for a queue number will receive an SMS on their mobile phones, once it is two slots before their assigned number. This allows patients to wait in the comfort of their homes rather than at the clinic. As a result of this CCI project, the company achieved a reduction in patient waiting time by 23 per cent and a more than 10 per cent improvement in patient satisfaction.

CCI is a multi-agency initiative spearheaded by SPRING Singapore and the NTUC with representatives from the Workforce Development Agency (WDA), Singapore Tourism Board (STB) and Institute of Service Excellence at SMU (ISES). It is part of the Go-the-Extra-Mile for Service (GEMS) Up movement to transform Singapore’s service quality in the retail, food and beverage, hospitality, healthcare, transport and travel sectors. 

Photo credit: WorldSkills UK - Wales