‘Service excellence has been introduced in more and more organizations, not only inGermany but also in many other parts of the world.’
Interview 1 of the Japanese Standards Association (JSA) with ISO/TC 312 chairperson

Service excellence is an initiative to enhance the “capabilities of an organization toconsistently deliver excellent services. 2” The responsible technical committee is ISO/TC 312,
working on the international standardization of service excellence. In this interview, we[JSA] spoke to Prof. Matthias Gouthier from Germany, who chairs ISO/TC 312, about thecase studies in Germany and the future direction of international standardization work.

JSA: In 2023, the first face-to-face meeting in almost three years took place. How do you feeland think about it?
Prof. Gouthier: Since the Corona pandemic, the majority of managers and employees aroundthe world have gained much experience with virtual meetings and I think it has worked
efficiently. It reduces the costs of meetings, such as travel costs, and it eliminates the need tospend time travelling for business.
However, this is only my personal opinion, I feel now, while attending this international
conference here in Cyprus, that face-to-face meetings are more effective, if not more efficient,than virtual meetings.
By meeting face to face, we can look the delegates and members of the participating countries
in the eye and have better discussions. Besides, it is also possible to discuss potentially
1 A revised version of an article published in SQ Magazine, a journal of the Japanese Standards Association (JSA). The original

interview can be found at: https://webdesk.jsa.or.jp/common/W10K0620/?id=952 andhttps://webdesk.jsa.or.jp/common/W10K0620/?id=953
2 Excellent service refers to the “output of an organization with a high level of service provision performed between theorganization and the customer to achieve outstanding customer experiences that lead to customer delight.” (ISO 23592, p. 1)

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problematic issues in private between the official meetings to reach solutions. In addition tomeetings, social events are also important. Learning about other cultures is very important forchanging perspectives.
We believe it creates positive empathy, better solutions and standards for our international
standardization work.

10th meeting of ISO/TC 312 in Larnaca, Cyprus

JSA: ISO's technical committee, ISO/TC 312, has been working on the international
standardization of service excellence since the TC was established. What progress has been
made so far?
Prof. Gouthier: Since our first meeting in Berlin in March 2018, we have been working on
developing international standards, and our most important success has been the publicationof the basic standard ISO 23592 (“Service excellence - Principles and model”). After thepublication of this standard, we received much positive feedback from national andinternational companies in Germany. They increasingly take up the term and concept ofservice excellence and deal with its ideas in Germany and worldwide.
Interestingly, service excellence teams have recently been established in companies, "Head of"and "Vice Presidents" are directly responsible for service excellence, and job postings now
include the heading "Service Excellence Manager Wanted."
To give an example, Brenntag SE, a global market leader in distributing chemicals andingredients with its headquarter in Germany and 17,000 employees worldwide, established aService Excellence program some time ago and has managers, global managers and regionalmanagers, responsible for service excellence. They realized how important it is to focus not
only on basic quality but also on the emotional aspects as the next level to aim for, and they
use the standard in their internal training to explain it to their employees. They use a slight
modification from the ISO standard definition.
We believe that the great success of this ISO/TC 312 is that it has provided a basic model thatcan be used by various organizations worldwide. Furthermore, we have also published asecond successful ISO standard on designing excellent service – ISO/TS 24082. This standard
helps companies to learn how to design excellent services.
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Third, an ISO standard for measuring service excellence performance is ISO/TS 23686. This
standard is essential not only from a scientific point of view but also from a practitioner'sperspective. The standard explains in detail what methodology and indicators can be used tomeasure service excellence performance.

JSA: How do German companies implement service excellence? Can you give us some moredetailed examples?
Prof. Gouthier: As mentioned earlier, Brenntag SE uses ISO 23592 to implement service
excellence. They have based their understanding of customer delight 3 on this standard anddeveloped its own service excellence program. They implemented this program partly throughmuch training but also through much effort to improve the qualifications of their employees
and their management team.
A prerequisite for the successful implementation of service excellence is that top management
and the board of directors are convinced to implement service excellence. For an organization
to become the best service provider in the future, it is very effective to define a clear vision,
which requires a competent and motivated management team.
In addition, all employees must also have a fundamental understanding of this concept andrethink their daily work and behavior. In other words, instead of being satisfied with averagecustomer service and complaint handling, there should be constant team discussions on
creating even better customer service and complaint handling in the organization.
Another example is the company oneservice, which I helped found in 2017. This global andvendor-independent service company offers complete managed service solutions andconsulting services for life science, diagnostics, and medical devices. The company isdistinguished by its emphasis on the people who deliver the service. They are at the heart ofthe company, and if the customer is satisfied to delighted with their work, this leads to afollow-up order.
To do this, oneservice had to understand customer delight and why it is necessary. We trained
our employees, especially our service technicians, efficiently and straightforwardly. What we
did was to use eLearnings, i.e., digital content up to three minutes long, to teach them “what isservice excellence,” “what is the difference between customer satisfaction and customer
delight,” “what kind of customers exist,” and “how to serve them in the best possible way.”
They were also motivated to take the training by quizzes and prizes at the end of the learning.
However, these are only the starting point for a clear understanding of the thinking behindservice excellence during the one-hour training.
The examples of service excellence initiatives are often those of large international companies,
but this is an excellent example of how small and medium-sized companies can also achieve
service excellence and how to motivate employees to do so at the same time.

3 “Positive emotions experienced by the customer derived from either an intense feeling of being highly valued or by expectations
being exceeded, or both.” (ISO 23592, p. 2)

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Screenshot from a digital training module of oneservice related to Service Excellence

Then, as another example, WISAG is one of Germany's largest facility management companies.
A few years ago, I discussed with their Board of Directors at the time what they should do torealize the vision, which calls for WISAG to delight its customers and employees and win theirhearts. They have now been conducting an annual customer survey since 2013. Among otherthings, this asks about the degree and causes of customer delight. WISAG uses it to discover
how it can make customers happy as a facility management company. In this way, WISAG
could determine what competencies and behaviors employees should have and thus improvetheir behavior each year. This initiative gives an idea of how a company can delight customers.
The last example comes from Team Bank. As a financial institution, it focuses on modern
liquidity management and is part of the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken Cooperative Financial
Network. TeamBank dedicated itself to service excellence at a very early stage and introduced
it at a strategic level, among other things. With the mission to inspire its customers, it hascreated various instruments and ways to implement them. For example, it has introduced the"100+1" campaign. This recommends that average or standard performance is insufficient andthat one should never forget to give an extra percentage point to delight and surprisecustomers. To achieve this, a culture of service excellence must be created in the organization.
Creating such a culture is one of the most critical elements in implementing service excellence.
As I have found in several consulting projects with German and international companies, thegreatest challenge for them is creating a customer-centric culture, i.e., service excellence
culture. I firmly believe a suitable answer can be found in the international standard ISO
23592.

JSA: What are the prospects for this committee?
4Prof. Gouthier: We plan to publish ISO/TR 7179 to share various cases, such as the ones I
mentioned. We are working on this document under your Japanese lead, and as you know, wehave collected diverse cases from five countries, Barbados, China, Cyprus, Germany, andJapan. It is because, as one of our experts said, companies are looking for concrete ideas - how
to do it, build it, and implement it - best practices. This TR gives them some hints on how to dothat. Rather than simply telling organizations they need to involve their employees, specifics
on how to involve them are more compelling. Therefore, I believe that ISO/TR 7179 will be an
essential tool to help companies establish service excellence in the long term.
In addition, we are also developing a standard for public services based on the core standard
ISO 23592. The focus on the specifics of public services is also an inspiring approach, as publicservices are fundamentally different from usual consumptive and industrial services.
More recently, two new projects have also been proposed. These are the “Service Excellence
Maturity Model” and the “Service Excellence Implementation Approach."
If a company wants to become more customer-centric, the company and the employees wantto know where the organization is. For example, “Are we currently customer-centric?”,“Should we improve our performance further?”, “Are we below or above the average level?”etc. In other words, the maturity of the implementation of service excellence needs to beassessed. Based on this assessment, organizations can be supported in their transformation
through change management and transformation management. We are currently starting towork on international standards to support these issues.
Other possible future topics include internal service excellence, i.e., improving the customer
centricity of internal specialist departments, and the question of how digital technologies suchas AI can support the establishment of service excellence based on design standards. We will
also have to discuss a revision of ISO 23592 in the future. Currently, sustainability aspects are
not yet included in this standard, and we believe this is a necessary perspective for the future.

Prof. Dr. Matthias Gouthier, Chairperson, ISO/TC 312 (Service Excellence)
Professor of Marketing and Digital Services, Director of the Institute of Management and theCenter for Service Excellence (CSE) at the University of Koblenz, Germany.
His research interests include customer experience management, digitalization of services,
customer and employee emotions, and service excellence.

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