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.