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Superior customer service is necessary to maintain a competitive edge in international logistics. In order to develop a comprehensive customer service programme, a company must establish service levels for its customers, beginning with order cycle time and including all aspects of the customer service cycle. Discusses the importance of service standards and the areas in customer service where they should be developed. Describes standard variances and stresses the need to develop incentives for meeting service standard goals.

This paper sets out to consider the role that can be played by independent professional accreditation systems and processes in influencing and grounding the intrinsic quality of what is offered by a service provider who has secured this certification.

The approach takes the form of personal interviews conducted with senior management personnel within a range of accommodation providers who were responsible for preparing their accreditation submission.

More than 80 percent of respondents agreed that the process of applying for accreditation forced a critical review of all aspects of their operations, and heightened their awareness of things that could prove problematic and ways by which these problems could be effectively countered. Respondents also agreed that the process served to motivate the development and detailed documentation of policies, systems and procedures, which enabled greater consistency in the standard of what is provided.

The findings suggest that rigorous accreditation processes help service providers to review and confirm the appropriateness of what may already be in place, to ground the quality of what might need to be put in place, and to improve the standard of what is currently in place.

The paper augments what is posited by the service‐profit chain framework, shows how a focus on intrinsic quality can help to close the service design and standards gap, and also shows how extrinsic and independent professional accreditation processes can ground and enable the intrinsic quality and standard of what is offered.

A Process Model During the last five years, American businesses have increasingly accepted the notion that product quality is necessary for them to compete in today′s world markets. Product quality, in the context here, can be defined by an agreed set of standards and tolerance limits between the firm and its customers. Quality is achieved through the successful creation of form, possession, time, place, and quantity utilities for the firm′s products. Control must be implemented in order to ensure that these utilities are created to meet the standards and tolerance limits agreed upon by the firm and its customers. The purpose of exercising control is to ensure that desired results are attained from an activity or process. As such, it is important to exercise control over the logistics activities to make sure that time, place, and quantity utilities are created in accordance with customer needs. The purpose of this monograph is to present a rather comprehensive discussion of the concept of control. Specific control concepts presented include a discussion of the link between control and quality, the development of the characteristics of control and levels of sophistication of control, the presentation of an eclectic process control model, and suggestions to managers on how to implement the control process over logistics activities.

Customer service is now playing a vital role in every company′s attempt to improve the quality of its offering. Based on a number of real‐life projects carried out by the Marketing Improvements Group across many industry sectors, explores three main issues: why companies need a customer service culture; how to create and, more importantly, sustain the culture once developed; why having a good customer service culture is worth the time and resource investment. Also describes the process through which companies should go, in order to achieve a customer‐service culture change. These include: gaining the commitment of the whole company; the identification of the key issues; the establishment of causes; identifying how to change behaviour.

What is the best way for service organizations to evaluate and motivate service employees so that customers are retained and new customers are attracted? What motivates service employees to deliver high quality service? Are there actions a service organization can take, e.g. way of evaluating, training, and rewarding employees, which encourage them to perform to the organization’s advantage? Answers to these questions would enable a service organization to formulate a system that links human resource management policies to desired service employee performance, thus enhancing customer perceptions of service quality and organizational financial outcomes. This research investigated organizational citizenship behavior, with its framework of organizational rights and responsibilities, to explore these issues. The research shows that service employee perceptions of how they are treated by the service organization, i.e. what organizational rights they receive, are positively associated with organizational citizenship behaviors. Furthermore, it demonstrates that these behaviors result in more effective service delivery to organizational standards and enhanced customer perceptions of service quality.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role and relevance of external standards in demonstrating the value and impact of academic library services to their stakeholders.

Two UK standards, Charter Mark and Customer Service Excellence, are evaluated via an exploratory case study, employing multiple data collection techniques. Methods and results of phases 1‐2 of a three phase research project are outlined.

Despite some limitations, standards may assist the manager in demonstrating the value, impact and quality of academic libraries in a recessional environment. Active engagement and partnership with customers is imperative if academic libraries are to be viewed as vital to their parent organisations and thus survive.

This paper provides a systematic evaluation of the role of external accreditation standards in measuring academic library service value and impact.

Rapid changes in the facilities management environment combined with the rising expectations of users has made effective customer service one of the most important factors contributing to success in today’s efficient facilities management operations. To create an effective customer service programme, it is necessary to analyse needs and set appropriate standards that consider the total requirements and unique resource structure of the service providers in the facility environment. By taking advantage of the latest industry research and proven methods for establishing service standards, the facility manager can design and implement customer service programmes that contribute dramatically to customer satisfaction and the overall performance of the facilities management operation.

The aims of a project to introduce customer relations standards to a District Health Authority are discussed. The manner in which staff guidelines are produced and staff action programmes are developed is examined and ways in which the corporate identity of the Health Authority may be changed by improvements in customer services are explored.

This paper aims to describe the experiences of Australian general insurer AAMI, the first private company to offer a customer charter and draw a comparison between service guarantees and customer charters. The paper also proposes a decision-support framework for the design, implementation and management of an effective customer charter.

The methodology involved in-depth personal interviews and secondary data.

Many service guarantees are not well conceived, implemented, or monitored. The AAMI case, demonstrates how customer charters, originally developed in the public sector can be effectively adopted in private organizations. The customer charter appears to deliver significantly more benefits to customers and an organization than traditional service guarantees. Charters do this by publishing specific service standards based on extensive research, conducting independent audits, stating outcomes of below standard performance, providing a visible and accountable appeal system, and publicly and regularly reporting on performance against promises. An on-going feedback loop ensures continuous quality improvement.

Customer charter findings are based on one case study.

Using a decision-support framework for a customer charter, services may be clearly defined and customer expectations managed building towards an organization-wide commitment to meet service promises.

Customer charters are rare, with little known about how they operate in a private organization. The findings indicate that charters may be more effective as a quality assurance and marketing tool than a service guarantee.

Recently, the British Standards Institution (BSI) issued a new standard: BS 8600:1999 Complaints Management Systems – Guide to Design and Implementation. This standard tends to focus on those systems and procedures that organisations put into motion after a complaint has been received. However, for many customers, particularly of large organisations such as local government services, the problems begin with knowing how to gain access to the complaints system. In the public sector this visibility usually takes the form of some kind of information leaflet which should detail certain basic information that will allow customers to access the complaints system. This paper develops a framework for an effective customer complaints information leaflet and then evaluates Scottish councils’ corporate complaints information brochures against this framework to determine whether or not they meet its acceptance criteria for effectiveness. Each leaflet was evaluated against 12 points of good practice developed from both Central Government’s guidelines and the new British Standard guidelines. The results showed that although a majority of them met many of the framework criteria, a significant proportion fell well short of what would be deemed acceptable.