Introduction

Why is it that customer service is still cited so frequently as being terrible, with evidence from your most recent bad airline experience offered up? It could be because a brighter spotlight on services has led to improved management and, with it, rising customer expectations. Airlines, for example, have never provided such dependable service to so many people. Good airline service, perhaps too fondly remembered 25 years later, is no longer remarkable or even adequate for customers who experience it much more frequently than their counterparts in earlier days. We still complain mightily when an airline service snafu occurs. Regardless of reasons why customers complain about the services they receive, or whether or not overall levels of service have improved, it’s clear that there is room for a great deal of improvement in the way services are managed and consumed.

Meanwhile, some firms have become known for providing exemplary service. In every service industry, one or two organizations—breakthrough services—are leading the way. Whether we’re talking about Whole Foods Market or Apple in the retailing sector, the Vanguard Group or ING Direct (now Capital One 360) in financial services, Disney in entertainment, the Mayo Clinic or Apollo Hospitals in medical services, Southwest Airlines in transportation, or a select group of other service organizations in their respective industries, they share one thing in common: they have all changed the rules governing how entire global service industries are operated. That’s what is so exciting about them. It’s what makes it important to understand how they are designed and led.

Over the past 35 years we’ve observed some of the world’s most effective service leaders. Good leaders are good teachers. And they have taught us a lot. In the process, we have tried to get into the heads of these leaders to figure out how what they know influences what they do in creating successful services that have stood the test of time.

Through stories based on our collective experience, as well as an exploration of the underlying theoretical work in the field and its practical application, we present a narrative of remarkable successes, unnecessary failures, and future promise. We write with a definite point of view. The book seeks to provide a road map for the design and delivery of winning services for leaders entrusted with the task in the years to come.

THE RISE OF THE SERVICE SECTOR

The vast majority of the world’s workers are employed in providing services to others. Despite the often-heard lament about the loss of manufacturing jobs, the proportion of people working in services continues to increase. It’s time for a change in mindset about jobs that drive the developed economies of the world.

Jobs in just one service sector, professional and business services, have replaced manufacturing jobs as the mainstay of the middle class in the world’s developed economies. In the United States, there are many more jobs in professional and business services than in manufacturing, they are growing at a faster rate, and they pay substantially more for work that is much less menial. All of this is documented in the appendix.

The simple fact that service jobs make up such a large proportion of available employment at present and in the future places added responsibility on the shoulders of leaders in the service economy. The way service jobs are designed and the way service workers are led will influence the job satisfaction of more than 80 percent of the world’s workforce. The quality of their leadership will determine employees’ loyalty to their employers and their customers; their productivity; the profits they help create for their employers; and the long-term economic development of cities, states, regions, and countries. It will have a profound effect on life for billions of people around the world.

REALIZING THE SERVICE TRIFECTA

Our objective is to sort out the most important practices that contribute to realizing the service trifecta—that is, positive results for employees, customers, and investors. Beyond the service strategies that fuel win-win-win outcomes, we’ll look at the following:

1. Operating practices that produce employee and customer satisfaction, engagement, and “ownership”

2. The profit and growth that result from these practices

3. The effective hiring, nurturing, and retention of talent

4. The achievement of leverage and competitive edge through both/and instead of either/or thinking

5. The design of support systems that make the most effective use of technology, networks, and service facilities

6. The development of a small core of customers as “owners” who provide most or all of a firm’s growth and profitability

7. The creation of organizations, policies, and practices that attract and retain talent capable of leading firms through the uncertainties associated with the next transformations in service

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

Each of the eight main chapters is organized around what great service leaders have known and done—some for a long time. In addition, we look at some directions that we believe services will take in the future as well as what this will require of the reader as a service leader.

In chapter 1 we examine the evolution and underlying structure of service breakthroughs and the unique leadership beliefs and behaviors they require. Breakthrough service leadership is different from other types of leadership. It’s important to understand the ways as context for the remainder of the book.

In chapters 2 and 3 we appraise the durability of the ideas we have long championed—ways of structuring a strategic service vision based on customer and employee value equations (chapter 2) and the design of specific elements of strategy around a service profit chain (chapter 3). These chapters explore the reasons why service strategies succeed and fail.

Chapters 4 through 7 discuss ways in which great service leaders achieve results through improvements in the quality of experiences for employees and customers along with a reduction of costs and an increase in value for both. Think of them as sources of competitive edge or leverage, ways of achieving superior value for employees, customers, and investors alike, the goal of well-designed and well-managed services. This is not necessarily about doing more with less. It’s about that, but it’s also about doing a lot more with a few more resources.

Chapter 4 discusses the most important challenge facing service managers, that of creating great places to work, places that deliver what we call “internal quality” and are fueled by effective cultures. These are workplaces in which workers are engaged and enthusiastic about what they do. The effort begins with hiring for attitude and training for skills, but it involves much more. We visit places in which work is organized around clusters of customers, often performed by teams, and controlled in large measure by frontline workers themselves, reinforced by such devices as service guarantees. Their work is measured according to predetermined desired behaviors, and it is rewarded and recognized in ways that ensure universal value for employees, customers, and investors. These are workplaces that provide a window into a future of service work and workers in which jobs are viewed positively; job satisfaction, trust, and engagement are high; and instances of worker ownership behaviors are frequent.

Chapter 5 is about achieving competitive edge through wins for employees, customers, and investors alike—the service trifecta. It’s done by managing queues, customers, and the service “bookends”; “doing it right the second time” by means of effective service recovery; capitalizing on service co-creation by customers; and utilizing “both/and thinking” instead of settling for tradeoffs. It leads naturally in chapter 6 to ways of enabling frontline service providers to be heroes and heroines in the eyes of their customers through effective support from technology, networks, and facility design.

We shift our focus from employees to customers in chapter 7 in the quest to achieve much more than just customer satisfaction. Instead, we settle for no less than developing a core of customers as “owners” invested in the success of the service. Typically, these customer owners account for more than 100% of profits. This is done by establishing a consciousness of a customer owner’s lifetime value, putting in place processes for listening for and responding to customer needs, guaranteeing results, and putting the organization’s best customers to work in building the business.

In chapter 8, we explore the most important challenges that service leaders will face in the future as well as possible ways of dealing with them. Increasingly, service leaders will be co-creating new services with customers who adopt an ownership mentality, partnering and sharing resources with customers and even competitors, crowdsourcing talent, designing services compatible with mobile technologies for an ever more mobile-driven society, delivering seamless service on a global basis, and contending with international competition in services previously thought to be immune to foreign competitors. These trends portend a world of more and more fleeting competitive advantage in which nonfinancial criteria, deep indicators of performance, take on greater significance for service providers, customers, and investors.

This final chapter explores the qualities of leadership that will assume greater importance in an uncertain and rapidly changing competitive world—a world that will require organizations to be adept at learning and fast reacting for the future while attending to current performance.

WHAT GREAT SERVICE LEADERS KNOW AND DO

From anecdotes, cautionary tales, and decades of research and observation, we have distilled here what great service leaders know and do. The summary in the sidebar provides the highlights of a rich story.

In reading this book, you will see that a growing number of practitioners and researchers have come a long way toward understanding ways of dealing with the challenges facing managers in the service sector today. There are many more examples of best practice on which to draw than when we first began examining the design and management of services nearly four decades ago. And there is more talent available to put them to work. It is an appropriate time to take stock, organize our thinking, and assess the basis for the further development of management practices in the service sector over the coming decades.

It is also clear that a lot of work remains to be done. A look at the data in the appendix regarding productivity and job satisfaction around the world leads us to conclude that service leaders are not doing well in living up to the magnitude of the task they face. The rate of increases in productivity lags manufacturing. Job satisfaction has rarely been lower.

Simply put, management has within its control the authority, and we think the responsibility, to improve service quality and productivity while increasing job satisfaction, employee engagement, and the bottom line for shareholders. It can be achieved through both/and thinking that rejects the popular notion of tradeoffs and leads to win-win-win results for employees, customers, and investors. This book is about ways it has been and will be achieved.

Reliance on stories about great service leaders involves a risk that we willingly assume. Our stories involve leaders whose organizations may not stand the test of time in spite of their efforts and ideas. For example, as we wrote the book, one of the leaders we profile, Gary Loveman, announced that he was stepping down as CEO of Caesar’s chain of casinos. After putting together a service strategy based on pathbreaking ideas and practices, he saw a subsidiary of his firm driven into bankruptcy by the financial engineering of a private equity firm that purchased Caesar’s for a high price and proceeded to load it with so much debt that its odds of success were greatly reduced, despite strong operating performance vis à vis competitors. An observer of Loveman stated “one of the drivers of his decision was he spent a lot more time on the balance sheet than he wanted to.”¹ In cases like this, which undoubtedly will be repeated in the future, outcomes do not dull our admiration for the practices implemented in the organization.

We know what has produced success in service endeavors in the past. We have observed and documented strong service principles and even developed some service management concepts ourselves that have endured in practice over time. However, it is quite obvious to us that what it took to produce a winning hand in managing in the service economies of the 1970s and 1980s is in many ways different than it is today. While many of the same questions prevail, management’s responses must be sensitive to future challenges facing service industries. With the help of the thinking—and doing—of outstanding practitioners, our goal here is to provide insights into what it takes to succeed now and in the future.

In every service industry, one or two organizations—breakthrough services—are leading the way. They are providing the blueprint for service excellence in the future. If they are to be emulated, we need first to understand what is so different about leading a breakthrough service organization.