Gemba Walks for Service Excellence: The Step-by-Step Guide for Identifying Service Delighters

Your customers have become increasingly sophisticated and more connected than ever—broadcasting real-time feedback to a cloud of followers who are watching your every move. As savvy customers continue to demand more for less, organizations that choose to rest on their laurels will quickly see their market share evaporate.

Gemba Walks for Service Excellence: The Step-by-Step Guide for Identifying Service Delighters guides readers on a journey towards organizational effectiveness that supports a culture of service excellence. It provides a fresh perspective on how to apply Gemba Walks—visiting the areas where the service provider interacts directly with the customer—to identify new service delighters and make a lasting positive impression on customers.

Using an abundance of color pictures and hand-drawn graphics, Robert Petruska builds on his considerable experience implementing Lean and quality systems to demonstrate how to create the infrastructure required for service excellence to flourish. Presented in an easy-to-follow format that anyone in the service industry can enjoy, this workbook:

• Shares proven techniques used in Lean manufacturing that can easily be applied to the service industry
• Guides new employees and veterans alike through a journey filled with real-life stories that inspire confidence
• Contains hands-on exercises that allow you to immediately apply the ideas to your own work

Filled with real-world examples and stories of service excellence, the book will help you develop the counterintuitive thinking needed to discover new sources of customer delight. Designed to be used with your entire team, this workbook will guide your organization, step by step, through a plan for assessing, prioritizing, and implementing innovative ideas that will lead to unprecedented levels of service excellence.

About the Author

Robert (Bob) Petruska is an independent consultant who helps organizations identify and remove barriers that prevent employees from delivering an exceptional customer experience. He has experience in the aerospace, automotive, healthcare, food, office, and service industries. Bob likes to take teams on a fun-filled journey where passion for improvement meets innovative best practices. Teams take pride in creating their own success blueprints, and then rapidly implement positive changes to realize their desired future states. Organizational energy spreads as age-old issues are quickly addressed, and new opportunities emerge as more and more people join in the fun.

Bob is an avid presenter whose energy and enthusiasm is contagious, as evident by positive participant feedback. He also holds a Bachelor of Science in industrial technology and a Master of Science in manufacturing systems from Southern Illinois University. Bob is a senior member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ), and is a Certified Six Sigma Black Belt.