Make Your Service Fail-Safe
One of the most useful concepts of the TQM movement in manufacturing is the application of poka-yoke, or fail-safe, methods to prevent human errors from becoming defects in the end product. Here the authors argue that these methods apply equally well to services and provide a framework for systematically applying poka-yokes to service encounters. They suggest that actions of the system, the server, and the customer can be fail-safed, and provide numerous examples to stimulate service managers to think in fail-safe terms.