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Zusatztext Leonard Berry Professor of Marketing and JCPenney Professor of Retailing Studies! Texas A&M University! Author of On Great Service and Marketing Services The authors effectively integrate their wide body of research and thinking into an incisive framework for organizational leadership. Informationen zum Autor James L. Heskett teaches at the Harvard Business School and is the coauthor of Service Breakthroughs. Klappentext Directly linking profit and growth not only to customer loyalty and satisfaction but to employee productivity! the authors present a step-by-step action plan for managing! marketing! hiring! delivering services! and assessing results. In-depth case examples demonstrate how the best companies have managed in this regard. 50 line drawings. Chapter 1 Setting the Record Straight How many of us have attended seminars or read recently written books that admonish us to: (1) treat customers like royalty, (2) exceed customers' expectations, (3) either seek low operating costs or some means of differentiating our businesses from competitors, and (4) assume that the customer is always right. They are led by master storytellers who move with ease among the audience and are filled with enjoyable anecdotes that seem relevant at the time. We know. We've given our share of these presentations. Who hasn't heard a Nordstrom story at one of these seminars? Most often it's the one about the Nordstrom store that accepts the return of a set of tire chains by someone claiming to have bought them there even though Nordstrom doesn't sell tire chains. The misguided moral is that by wowing the customer in that manner, Nordstrom will gain a new customer and possibly great word-of-mouth advertising. However the story is designed to make a point that is not only illogical, but is supported by no substantial evidence, quantitative or otherwise. Fortunately, few of us try to act on the implied advice. And yet we remember the story, if not the point it is designed to make. A WORLD OF MISLEADING ADVICE Why is it that the advice implied by these storytellers is so difficult to apply? Or worse yet, leads to the opposite results that they forecast? It's because the advice too often is sometimes totally inappropriate and always partially wrong. It nearly always is offered out of context, is based on incorrect assumptions, emphasizes symptoms instead of real causes, in the process trivializes service issues by confining them to the front line, and overemphasizes process quality while underemphasizing results. Too Much Advice out of Context Too much anecdote-peppered advice is given by many service gurus today without a context. We're not told that what worked in one organization may not be appropriate for another. The advice is so overly simplistic that it leads us as managers to seek the elusive "one big idea" that can help us improve performance. It is offered with little real supporting evidence other than the fact that the subjects of the anecdotes are often regarded as successes. On the other hand, how often are we told that Nordstrom actually "fires" customers? We rarely, if ever, hear that side of the story. In fact, Nordstrom wows some customers and fires others who may be especially difficult for its staff to deal with (by advising them that, because of Nordstrom's failure to find a way to meet their needs, they should perhaps seek out other stores) as part of a careful strategy to target people with a particular profile and a record of outstanding loyalty to the company. If the tire story ever did occur, you can bet that it involved a customer that Nordstrom's people, based on facts, knew they did not want to alienate. In the context of a more carefully planned strategy, it could have made sense, although one could question the loyalty of a customer who would pull such a stunt...
