Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

Are you meeting your customers’ demand for great service—and saving money at the same time? If not, you’re at a serious disadvantage—missing out on building a sustainable business that’s profitable, scalable, and capable of delivering excellence every day. In Uncommon Service, Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei and coauthor Anne Morriss bring a provocative new argument to the table: that companies must dare to be “bad” in order to be great, choosing strategic ways to underperform while fueling a winning service advantage. According to the authors, “uncommon service” is created by specific design choices made in the very blueprint of a business model. And it’s not about making a customer happy; instead, it’s about creating an organization where all employees—not just star performers—provide excellent service as a matter of routine. Outstanding service organizations create offerings, funding strategies, systems, and cultures that set their people up to excel casually. Introducing a decidedly fresh view of service, the authors present an organizational design model built on tough choices you must make about four dimensions of your business: • Your service offering: How do customers define “excellence” in your offering? • Your service funding mechanism: How will you get paid for delivering excellence? • Your employee management system: How will you prepare your employees to deliver excellence every day? • Your customer management system: How will you get your customers to behave in ways that improve their service experience—without disrupting anyone else’s? Create an organizational culture that reinforces smart decisions around these four dimensions and you’ll achieve a service advantage that rivals can’t hope to copy. Frei and Morriss illustrate the power of this approach with examples of winning companies from a wide array of industries—including financial services, commercial aviation, health care, and retail. Practical and engaging, Uncommon Service makes a powerful case for a new and systematic approach to customer service as a pathway to unprecedented productivity and profitability