Service-Ability: Create a Customer Centric Culture and Achieve Competitive Advantage

Service-Ability: Create a Customer Centric Culture and Achieve Competitive Advantage

Released December 2012
Publisher(s): Wiley
ISBN: 9781118345566

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Book description

Times have changed.

Long gone are our days of being kings of the manufacturing industry, we are now immersed in the world of 'service' where the relationship between an organization and the customer is an integral part of the 'product' offering. The nation is suffering from a widespread lack of truly customer-satisfying service. We lack the very thing that we need to make this new paradigm work efficiently: service-ability.

Organizations of all kinds are facing high customer churn, serious customer antagonism, loss of consumer confidence and plummeting customer satisfaction. Research shows that totally satisfying the customer is the only thing that will secure loyalty and offer significant competitive advantage. Yet still, on a daily basis we encounter service that frustrates us.

Whilst the emergence of technology has no doubt brought efficiency to many areas of business activity, including the third sector, it has led to the standardised and indifferent service we regularly receive. We appear to have lost sight that people do business with people. Through efficient technology, our organisations may be serviceable but they are not service able.

The arrival of Generation Y and the developments in social media, provide businesses with a whole new way to engage with their customers, but also provide a new way for customers to rate companies, products and services: not always in a positive manner. 'Like' or '#Fail' have become part of our social language.

Organizations that refocus on the need to treat customers in a way that satisfies them, and not the technology, will have better customer retention, lower costs of replacement and will build their brand value through better reputations.

Service-Ability delves deeply into these areas to show how today's managers need to re-think the way we structure, manage, lead and organize our companies to achieve total 'customer-centric' work cultures that develop lasting relationships with customers.

Table of contents

  1. COVER
  2. TITLE PAGE
  3. COPYRIGHT PAGE
  4. CHUANG-TZU
  5. PREFACE
  6. FOREWORD
  7. 1 CONNECTEDNESS
    1. Migram and six degrees of separation
    2. Dunbar’s number
    3. Gladwell and Granovetter
    4. Web 2.0 and word of mouth
    5. Apostles and Terrorists
    6. Feedback loops
    7. Reflection on United
  8. 2 CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AND ITS LINK TO PROFIT
    1. Non-rational man
    2. The rational organizaion
    3. All people, all levels
    4. Moments of truth
    5. Customer relationships built on trust
    6. Totally satisfied customers
    7. Loyalty = profit
    8. Internal service quality
  9. 3 OUR INDUSTRIAL LEGACY
    1. The Industrial Revolution
    2. Weber & bureaucracy
    3. Fordism
    4. Fayol and the human relations school
    5. Jump 70 years
    6. New approach to management
  10. 4 OUR SERVICE ECONOMY
    1. A difficult birth
    2. The service economy
    3. Commercially dangerous
    4. The effect of technology
    5. British disease
    6. Demographics
    7. Lower pay/inequality
    8. Employment ‘contract’
    9. Opportunity
  11. 5 SERVICING CUSTOMERS IS NOT CUSTOMER SERVICE
    1. Porter’s value chain
    2. Balanced scorecard
    3. Car body repair shop story
    4. The customer is king
    5. The cost of quality
    6. The Bottom Line interview
    7. Call centres
    8. Customer value triad
    9. Summary
  12. 6 UNDERSTANDING SERVICE-ABILITY
    1. Engagement
    2. Initiative
    3. Professionalism
    4. Involvement
  13. 7 GETTING THE PEOPLE RIGHT
    1. Recruitment
    2. Intellectual capital
    3. Inappropriate management
    4. Rules and regulations
    5. Greed and financial incentives
    6. Pink on reward and motivation
    7. Strategic HRM
    8. Nissan and Google
    9. Summarizing modernized management
  14. 8 APPROPRIATE ORGANIZATION
    1. Power of the office desk
    2. Coercive bureaucracy
    3. A real-life example
    4. Inappropriate technology
    5. Form follows function
    6. Small is beautiful
    7. Organismic vs. mechanistic
    8. Teamwork
    9. Autonomous, self-managing teams
    10. Complexity theory
    11. Summing up appropriate organization
  15. 9 EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP
    1. Leadership concepts
    2. Corridors of power poem
    3. Sources of power
    4. Distributed leadership
    5. Servant leadership
    6. Primus inter pares
    7. Empowerment
    8. Practical wisdom
    9. Winterbourne View
    10. Re-moralizing work – Schwartz
    11. Hierarchy
    12. Collective wisdom
    13. Honesty without fear
  16. 10 CLARITY OF PURPOSE
    1. Mission, vision
    2. Obliquity vs. narrow strategy
    3. Engagement
    4. Purpose
    5. Purposefulness
    6. Purposeful systems
    7. Values – The fuel tank that never runs dry
    8. Matshushita on purpose
    9. Systems integration and process clarity
    10. Total service quality
    11. Approaches to quality
    12. Total Quality
  17. 11 BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER
  18. INDEX

Product information

  • Title: Service-Ability: Create a Customer Centric Culture and Achieve Competitive Advantage
  • Author(s):
  • Release date: December 2012
  • Publisher(s): Wiley
  • ISBN: 9781118345566