Uncommon Service - Frances Frei and Anne Morris

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

“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.

Great service, it turns out, is not made possible by running the business harder and faster on the backs of a few extraordinary people. It's made possible — profitable, sustainable, scalable — by designing a system that sets up everyone to excel.

UNCOMMON TAKEAWAYS

• To achieve service excellence, you must underperform in strategic ways. This means delivering on the service dimensions your customers value most, and then making it possible — profitable and sustainable —by performing poorly on the dimensions they value least. In other words, you must be bad in the service of good.

• The primary obstacle to service excellence is not the ambition to be great, but the stomach to be bad. This is an emotional obstacle.

• It's difficult to compete without understanding your customers' needs and how well your competitors are meeting those needs. Fortunately, customers are typically very willing to give you that information. And it's cheap and easy to ask them for it.

• There is an important distinction between marketing and operating segments. Marketing segments tell us how to identify and communicate with different kinds of customers. Operating segments tell us how to serve customers differently.There is rarely a one-to-one mapping between these segments.

• There are two key ways to improve service: (1) meet your customers' existing needs more effectively, or (2) convince your customers that they need something you already do well.

• There is a difference between financial models and service models. Service companies need to be "bi-lingual" to excel.

Uncommon Service - Frances Frei and Anne Morris

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

“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 TAKEAWAYS

• To achieve service excellence, you must underperform in strategic ways. This means delivering on the service dimensions your customers value most, and then making it possible — profitable and sustainable —by performing poorly on the dimensions they value least. In other words, you must be bad in the service of good.

• The primary obstacle to service excellence is not the ambition to be great, but the stomach to be bad. This is an emotional obstacle.

• It's difficult to compete without understanding your customers' needs and how well your competitors are meeting those needs. Fortunately, customers are typically very willing to give you that information. And it's cheap and easy to ask them for it.

• There is an important distinction between marketing and operating segments. Marketing segments tell us how to identify and communicate with different kinds of customers. Operating segments tell us how to serve customers differently.There is rarely a one-to-one mapping between these segments.

• There are two key ways to improve service: (1) meet your customers' existing needs more effectively, or (2) convince your customers that they need something you already do well.

• There is a difference between financial models and service models. Service companies need to be "bi-lingual" to excel.