Delivering excellent service: Lessons from the best firms

Delivering excellent service: Lessons from the best firms
Robert C Ford, Cherrill P Heaton, Stephen W Brown.
California Management Review. Berkeley:
Fall 2001. Vol. 44, Iss. 1; pg. 39, 18 pgs

Many principles derived from the success of outstanding service organizations are now more applicable to non-services than ever before.

Lesson 1: Base Decisions on What the Customer Wants and Expects

Lesson 2: Think and Act in Terms of the Entire Customer Experience

Lesson 3: Continuously Improve All Parts of the Customer Experience

Lesson 4: Hire and Reward People Who Can Effectively Build Relationships with Customers

Lesson 5: Train Employees in How to Cope with Their Emotional Labor Costs

Lesson 6: Create and Sustain a Strong Service Culture

Lesson 7: Avoid Failing Your Customers Twice

Lesson 8: Empower Customers to Co-produce Their Own Experiences

Lesson 9: Get Managers to Lead from the Front, Not from the Top

Lesson 10: Treat All Customers as if They Were Guests

For further reading

T.H. Davenport, J.G. Harris, and A.K. Kohli, "How Do They Know Their Customers So Well?" Sloan Management Review, 42/2 (Winter 2001): 63-72.

B.E. Ashford and R.H. Humphrey, "Emotional Labor in Service Roles," Academy of Management Review, 18/11 (January 1993): 88-115;

E.H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership: A Dynamic View (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1985);

J.M. Kouzes and B.Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge - How to Keep Getting Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1995).