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

by Frances Frei, Anne Morriss Narrated by Eliza Foss

Overview

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

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

“The book was uncommonly excellent. Very straightforward and to the point. Frei and Morriss uncover four basic truths about customer service, discuss the important ingredient of culture and provide guidance on how companies can scale to get bigger...this might be the best book I’ve ever read on achieving service excellence.” — Stan Phelps, CustomerThink (customerthink.com)

“This book is a practical guide for leaders who want to use service to strategically differentiate their companies from the competition.” — Jeff Toister, CustomerThink (customerthink.com)

“Anne Morriss and Harvard Business School Professor Frances Frei make the counterintuitive, but compelling argument that true success for service businesses requires that you give up on being perfect; that you make some tradeoffs.” — Business Insider (businessinsider.com)

“Morriss and Frei have a powerful and surprising answer…” — Forbes.com

“In this upbeat and highly readable book, the authors isolate four “service truths” that companies must understand…” — BizEd magazine

“The book is full of case studies showing how companies have harnessed their strengths but cut corners elsewhere, in pursuit of the ultimate goal: excellent service.” — South Africa Financial Mail

“I found Uncommon Service to be a refreshing, frank and honest look at how any organization can increase profitability, satisfaction and competitive advantage by delivering consistently outstanding service.” — American Express Open Forum

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177548104
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	06/09/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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