Varia Ranah - Sorotan Ilmiah Perkhidmatan Awam

462 Varia Ranah: Sorotan Ilmiah Perkhidmatan Awam (iv) Increased customer focus and training • Involve the customer in the design of the service package • Train employees in customer service skills and behaviours • Train customers in how to contribute to quality service (v) Employee empowerment • Invest significantly in employees (skills, teambuilding, participation) • Empower employees to leverage customers’ value equation (benefits divided by price and other costs) The five characteristics listed above have big similarities with Womack and Jones (1996) five principles, with a focus on customer value, value flow, continuous flow and pull, and striving for perfection through the empowerment of employees. However, the view that manufacturing concepts could more or less be applied to the service contexts has been criticized. When it comes to lean, Ahlstrom (2004) explains that there are some contingencies that occur when Lean is used in the service context, and some principles must be translated to be meaningful for service organisations. Due to the involvement of customer in the service process, the principle of waste elimination is sometimes problematic since the expectations from customers may differ. What is waste for one customer may be valuable for another. Another principle that can be problematic is zero defects. Although a low defect rate is crucial in many service processes, the high involvement of customers in the process makes it unrealistic to achieve zero defects. Parasuraman et al. (1985) suggest three aspects that are important to understand service quality. Firstly, the intangibility of services (Bateson, 1979; Lovelock, 2011) makes it difficult to set measurable specifications of services in the same way as in manufacturing. It may also be difficult for the organisation to understand how the customer perceives the service (Parasuraman et al., 1985). Secondly, services have generally a large variability between different producers and