Why are a select few service firms better at what they do - year in and year out - than their competitors? For most senior managers, the profusion of anecdotal "service excellence" books fails to address this key question. In this pathbreaking book, world-renowned Harvard Business School service firm experts James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr. and Leonard A. Schlesinger reveal that leading companies stay on top by managing the service profit chain. Based on five years of painstaking research, the authors show how managers at American Express, Southwest Airlines, Banc One, Waste Management, USAA, MBNA, Intuit, British Airways, Taco Bell, Fairfield Inns, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the Merry Maids subsidiary of ServiceMaster employ a quantifiable set of relationships that directly links profit and growth to not only customer loyalty and satisfaction, but to employee loyalty, satisfaction, and productivity. The strongest relationships the authors discovered are those between (1) profit and customer loyalty; (2) employee loyalty and customer loyalty; and (3) employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Moreover, these relationships are mutually reinforcing; that is, satisfied customers contribute to employee satisfaction and vice versa. Here, finally, is the foundation for a powerful strategic service vision, a model on which any manager can build more focused operations and marketing capabilities. For example, the authors demonstrate how, in Banc One's operating divisions, a direct relationship between customer loyalty measured by the "depth" of a relationship, the number of banking services a customer utilizes, and profitability led the bank to encourage existing customers to further extend the bank services they use. Taco Bell has found that their stores in the top quadrant of customer satisfaction ratings outperform their other stores on all measures. At American Express Travel Services, offices that ticket quickly and accurately are more profitable than those which don't. With hundreds of examples like these, the authors show how to manage the customer-employee "satisfaction mirror" and the customer value equation to achieve a "customer's eye view" of goods and services. They describe how companies in any service industry can (1) measure service profit chain relationships across operating units; (2) communicate the resulting self-appraisal; (3) develop a "balanced scorecard" of performance; (4) develop a recognitions and rewards system tied to established measures; (5) communicate results company-wide; (6) develop an internal "best practice" information exchange; and (7) improve overall service profit chain performance. What difference can service profit chain management make? A lot. Between 1986 and 1995, the common stock prices of the companies studied by the authors increased 147%, nearly twice as fast as the price of the stocks of their closest competitors. The proven success and high-yielding results from these high-achieving companies will make The Service Profit Chain required reading for senior, division, and business unit managers in all service companies, as well as for students of service management.

The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value (Цепочка создания прибыли в сфере услуг: как ведущие компании связывают прибыль и рост с лояльностью, удовлетворением и ценностью)

textPrior studies have emphasized that structural attributes are crucial to simultaneously pursuing exploration and exploitation, yet our understanding of antecedents of ambidexterity is still limited. Structural differentiation can help ambidextrous organizations to maintain multiple inconsistent and conflicting demands; however, differentiated exploratory and exploitative activities need to mobilized, coordinated, integrated, and applied. Based on this idea, we delineate formal and informal senior team integration mechanisms (i.e. contingency rewards and social integration) and formal and informal organizational integration mechanisms (i.e. cross-functional interfaces and connectedness) and examine how they mediate the relationship between structural differentiation and ambidexterity. Overall, our findings suggest that the previously asserted direct effect of structural differentiation on ambidexterity operates through informal senior team (i.e. senior team social integration) and formal organizational (i.e. cross-functional interfaces) integration mechanisms. Through this richer explanation and empirical assessment, we contribute to a greater clarity and better understanding of how organizations may effectively pursue exploration and exploitation simultaneously to achieve ambidexterity.

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Structural Differentiation and Ambidexterity: The Mediating Role of Integration Mechanisms

While many researchers have made contributions to the now extensive literature on service quality, there is much less research on what constitutes delight in service quality and how organizations can delight customers. This article examines the differences between customer satisfaction and customer delight, notably the benefits of delighting rather than merely satisfying customers. It describes how to delight customers, outlines how to implement a successful customer delight program, shows how to measure customer delight, and discusses the potential pitfalls of doing so.

How to delight your customers

Two life cycle assessment (LCA) based methods to analyse and design complex (regional) circular economy systems. Case: making water tourism more sustainable

Online retailing across e-channels and e-channel touchpoints: Empirical studies of consumer behavior in the multichannel e-commerce environment

The increasing importance of information technology as a means to access and communicate information has prompted firms to enhance their corporate websites to establish relationships with potential...

Delighting Consumers Click by Click: Antecedents and Effects of Delight Online

Purpose – As customer expectations expand and as product offerings hardly differ from each other, service excellence has gained in importance as a means of enhancing customer loyalty. The aim of this paper is to focus on expanding and extending what companies can do to achieve service excellence by comparing and evaluating three popular approaches to excellence.Design/methodology/approach – The authors compare three of the most commonly used excellence models, Johnston's conceptualisation of service excellence, the EFQM Model as a representative of national quality award models and the Kano model, and their respective applicability and specific perspective on service excellence. The evaluation is based on theoretical arguments, criteria and on a qualitative expert study.Findings – Combining the selected models provides a comprehensive approach to service excellence. Since all models are compatible and complementary with each other, the analysis provides an enhanced understanding of service excellence and ...

Service excellence models: a critical discussion and comparison

Aufgrund von verschiedensten globalen Entwicklungen steigt der Grad des Wettbewerbs in vielen Wirtschaftszweigen stetig. Eine der grosten Herausforderungen, denen sich Unternehmen heute zu stellen haben, ist die Erfullung der permanent wachsenden Erwartungen, Anspruche und Wunsche, mit denen Kunden einem Unternehmen entgegen treten (Sultana 2008, S. 59). Dies ist unter anderem auf die zunehmende Verbreitung von neuen Technologien zuruckzufuhren, wie beispielsweise Social Media und Web 2.0. Diese Technologien fungieren fur Kunden als Enabler, sich schnell und effektiv uber das Marktangebot zu informieren, aber auch sich bezuglich besonders guten oder besonders schlechten Dienstleistungen und Produkten auszutauschen. Dementsprechend wird es fur Unternehmen immer schwieriger, den bestehenden Kundenstamm zu festigen oder gar weiter auszubauen.

Customer Experiences, Kundenbegeisterung und Service Excellence – Die Spezifikation DIN SPEC 77224

Aufgrund des andauernden Globalisierungsprozesses wird es fur Unternehmen zunehmend wichtiger, sich von ihren Wettbewerbern abzusetzen, um ihren momentanen Kundenstamm zu sichern und die eigene Marktposition zu festigen bzw. diese idealerweise noch auszubauen. Ebenfalls kann beobachtet werden, dass Kunden zunehmend anspruchsvoller werden, bereits kleinste Unterschiede zwischen den verschiedenen Angeboten registrieren und ihre Kaufabsichten dementsprechend anpassen. All diese Entwicklungen wirken sich signifikant auf den Grad des Wettbewerbs in vielen Markten aus und fuhren dazu, dass es mittlerweile langst nicht mehr genugt, Kunden lediglich zufrieden zu stellen. Stattdessen sollten Kunden von der angebotenen Leistung fest uberzeugt und emotional begeistert sein. Aus diesem Grund muss Kundenbegeisterung, und nicht mehr nur einfache Kundenzufriedenheit, das neue Ziel von fuhrenden Unternehmen sein.

Christopher Bartl

Papers

Delighting Consumers Click by Click: Antecedents and Effects of Delight Online

Service excellence models: a critical discussion and comparison

Customer Experiences, Kundenbegeisterung und Service Excellence – Die Spezifikation DIN SPEC 77224

Kundenbegeisterung durch Service Excellence im Automobilsektor