We hear all the time about standards.  How important they are.  How we need them for everything.  How we should never deviate from them.  Wait, back up the bus...

The standards I am referring to, for the context of this conversation, are around managed service offerings  What services we provide to our customers and how we deliver the services.

Standard offering definitions are critical to our business, or any business (internal or external) that provides services.  They set the stage and provide a consistent, repeatable and proven way of doing business.  The more consistent the offerings and delivery methods are, the faster we can ramp up and the better optimised we are which enables us to deliver more with less. By optimising on standards, we free up resources and we can then use those resources elsewhere. 

That is not the end of the story though.  We need to be careful about how rigid we get when applying standards.  Standards should always be the starting point.  However, we need to be careful to recognise when and how we need to deviate from our documented standards.  Since our customers are not all exactly the same (thank goodness!), we need to leverage our standards to fit the particular needs of a customer at a particular point in time and customize where it makes sense.

Sales and Service Standards include:

• Sales Standards
• Customer Requests for Merchandise
• Holding Merchandise for Customers
• Assisting Customers with Complaints and Repairs
• Forward Orders
• Pricing|Granting of Discounts
• Guarantees|Warranties
• Cancelled Orders