Uncommon service : how to win by putting customers at the core of your business

168 Pages·2012·1.5 MB·English

by  Frei

Copyright 2012 Frances Frei and Anne Morriss All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
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without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frei, Frances.
Uncommon service : how to win by putting customers at the core of your business / Frances Frei, Anne
Morriss.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-422-13331-6 (alk. paper) Customer relations. 2. Customer services. 3. Service industries—
Management. I. Morriss, Anne. II. Title.
HF5415.5.F728 2012
658.8'12—dc23
2011029760

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for
Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives Z39.48-992.
How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

FRANCES FREI | ANNE MORRISS

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS
Boston, Massachusetts
Advance Praise for Uncommon Service
“If you believe in service excellence, you must read this book. In it you will discover the importance of
making the right choices and trade-offs in your business model so that your team can consistently deliver
uncommon service.”
—Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, Chairman, Interbank Group

“Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’s Uncommon Service is a joy to read and a treasure to study. The authors
provide both theories of how great service works and case studies that demonstrate how to make it happen.
Always intuitive, never patronizing, and really smart, Uncommon Service will help any executive—in a big
company or small, public firm or nonprofit organization—think creatively about how to deliver service that
truly works.”
—Debora Spar, President, Barnard College

“Uncommon Service is about how to deliver service excellence by design. It shows managers how to satisfy
customers—not just on your organization’s best days, but as an everyday routine.”
—Tom Watson, Dean, Omnicom University; Cofounder and Vice Chairman Emeritus, Omnicom
Group, Inc.

To our mothers and our sons,
who inspire us to serve
Contents

Cover
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
If This Is a Service Economy, Why Am I Still on Hold?
Chapter 1
Truth Number 1: You Can’t Be Good at Everything
Chapter 2
Truth Number 2: Someone Has to Pay for It
Chapter 3
Truth Number 3: It’s Not Your Employees’ Fault
Chapter 4
Truth Number 4: You Must Manage Your Customers
Chapter 5
Now Multiply It All by Culture
Chapter 6
Getting Bigger
Conclusion
Notes
Index
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
One of the gifts of working in academia is that you are surrounded by people
who devote themselves to the art of education. They have no choice but to teach,
and you have no choice but to learn, more often than not from every
conversation. Throughout the book we have tried to celebrate the thinkers who
have influenced us along the way, many of them colleagues who drive into the
same parking lot every day. No doubt, we have fallen short.
We owe a particular debt of gratitude to the breakthrough work on services
done by Ben Schneider and David Bowen, authors of Winning on Service, and
Earl Sasser, Jim Heskett, and Len Schlesinger, authors of The Service Profit
Chain. By capturing the importance of organizational design and the vital role
that service employees play in building healthy companies, these books changed
the way the world thought about the business of service. We have also been
deeply influenced by the moral and intellectual courage of Clay Christensen,
author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. Clay has an extraordinary ability to distill
out the essential truths of a complex world.
Our hope in writing this book is to give people the tools—and audacity—to
go out and change organizations. Youngme Moon, author of Different, embodies
this type of leadership. She has given us, and so many others, permission to
dream.
Like Youngme, most of the messengers in this book study business. We
don’t typically associate service with the crass act of making money, yet for
millions of people every day, the bulk of their human interactions takes place in
a commercial setting. Do we really lose our humanity once we climb into the
capitalist arena and add profit to the spoils? Of course not. Which means that we
should be able to resolve the gap between the very human desire to serve and the
frustrating service experiences we’re now asking each other to endure. It is a
gap, we believe, the world is ready to close.
Introduction
If This Is a Service Economy, Why Am I Still on Hold?
We live and work in a service economy. In 1950, industrial workers represented
the single largest employment sector in any developed country. Today, 80
percent of jobs are in service, and service represents 80 percent of the U.S. gross
national product.
We cherish good service. In survey after survey, it’s an enormous
differentiator in our experience as consumers. Companies that deliver service
excellence get a disproportionate share of our income, and our loyalty to them is
often difficult to shake. In researching this book, we encountered more than a
few people who were brought to tears as they recalled an empathetic insurance
provider or an airline experience that made them feel human, despite their
screaming infant or lost luggage.
We find deep meaning in the act of serving. We’ve been devising ways to
take care of each other—and celebrating the results—since the human story was
first documented. Developmental psychologists tell us that a willingness to help
strangers is a trait that most people exhibit at as young an age as eighteen
months. It’s an almost universal impulse to serve, one that can get crowded out
by other instincts, certainly, but if you peel back the layers of what motivates us,
more often than not you’ll find a very core ambition to be useful to others.
And yet. Good service is still, for the most part, rare. In our experience as
economic actors, in industry across industry, we’re increasingly frustrated and
disappointed. Customers, employees, owners—no one wants to deliver bad
service, and no one wants to endure it. But that’s the experience we continue to
inflict on each other.
Why is that?
This is the question that animates this book—why is service so hard to get
right, despite the fact that we’re wired for it? How can we channel the human
impulse to serve into greater productivity, greater returns, and greater
satisfaction all around?
Here’s what we’ve learned: uncommon service is not born from attitude