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.

Service Excellence = Design x Culture

UNCOMMON TAKEAWAYS

• It's not enough to design your service model right. Uncommon service is achieved when great organizational design meets a culture of service excellence. A basic way to think about it is this: service excellence is a product of design and culture.

• The right culture is not a universal concept. Your right culture is a distinct asset that must be consistent with your organization's service model.

• One way to understand culture is to break it down into its relevant components. We like Edgar Schein's culture framework, which loosely divides a culture into artifacts, behaviors, and shared basic assumptions. As Schein argues, to change behavior (a company's typical goal), you have to change the way people think. To change the way people think, start with the underlying assumptions that drive that thinking.

• Great service organizations tend to do three things well in their relationship with culture. They have deep clarity about the organizational culture they must cultivate in order to compete and win. They are effective in signaling the norms and values that embody that culture. And they work hard to ensure cultural consistency, alignment between the desired culture and organizational strategy, structure, and operations.

Service Excellence = Design x Culture

UNCOMMON TAKEAWAYS

• It's not enough to design your service model right. Uncommon service is achieved when great organizational design meets a culture of service excellence. A basic way to think about it is this: service excellence is a product of design and culture.

• The right culture is not a universal concept. Your right culture is a distinct asset that must be consistent with your organization's service model.

• One way to understand culture is to break it down into its relevant components. We like Edgar Schein's culture framework, which loosely divides a culture into artifacts, behaviors, and shared basic assumptions. As Schein argues, to change behavior (a company's typical goal), you have to change the way people think. To change the way people think, start with the underlying assumptions that drive that thinking.

• Great service organizations tend to do three things well in their relationship with culture. They have deep clarity about the organizational culture they must cultivate in order to compete and win. They are effective in signaling the norms and values that embody that culture. And they work hard to ensure cultural consistency, alignment between the desired culture and organizational strategy, structure, and operations.