Service organizations comprise more than 80% of the GDP in the United States and are rapidly growing around the world.  Support services within manufacturing organizations (design, finance, human resources, sales, etc.) often comprise over 80% of the product cost.  Organizations that rely on providing services to sustain the organization depend heavily on building relationships with customers to maintain loyalty and build trust for future sales.  As a result the measures that are necessary to monitor success are not always clear and often require interaction between the workforce and the customer.

Therefore, business improvement depends a great deal on the alignment of the workforce with the voice of the customer.  Success for the service organization means:  -   Systematic methods of communicating with the customer and constant monitoring of the levels of satisfaction  -   Teamwork to ensure that the workforce is clearly educated on the expectations of the organization and that measures are put in place to build accountability within the system.  -   Decisions are made based on data and the data is reliable and secure.  -   Continuous improvement is a philosophy that is modeled by the leadership and processes are contently refined with by-in from the workforce. The Iowa Quality Center can help service organizations take advantage of performance excellence tools to engage to workforce, measure, track and improve internal processes and monitor customer satisfaction and build alignment witin the organization.