If This Is a Service Economy, Why Am I Still on Hold?

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If This Is a Service Economy, Why Am I Still on Hold?

By Frances Frei & Anne Morriss The article is an excerpt from Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business, by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss. (Harvard Business Review Press 2012) 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 and effort, but from design choices made in the very blueprints of a business model. It’s easy to throw service into a mission statement and periodically do whatever it takes to make a customer happy. What’s hard is designing a service model that allows average employees–not just the exceptional ones–to produce service excellence as an everyday routine. Outstanding service organizations create offerings, funding strategies, systems, and cultures that set their people up to excel casually. “Uncommon service is not born from attitude and effort, but from design choices made in the very blueprints of a business model…Outstanding service organizations create offerings, funding strategies, systems, and cultures that set their people up to excel casually.”

http://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/?p=6475

03-11-2012


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