What Do Citicorp, UPS and Marriott have in common? They are
"breakthrough" service providers,
firms that changed the rules of the game in their respective
industries by consistently meeting or exceeding customer needs and
expectations. To find out how these companies do it, service
management experts James Heskett, Earl Sasser, and Christopher Hart
put the question to the chief executive officers of fifteen of
America's leading service firms attending a workshop at the Harvard
Business School. Breakthrough leaders, they discovered, think very
differently about their businesses than do their competitors, in
distinct and well-defined ways. Now, in "Service Breakthroughs, "
based upon five years of exhaustive research in fourteen service
industries, Heskett, Sasser, and Hart show exactly what enables one
or two companies in each industry to constantly set new standards
for quality and value that force competitors to adapt or fail.
At the heart of breakthrough performance, the authors contend, is
a sometimes intuitive
but thorough understanding of the "self-reinforcing service cycle"
that replaces traditional management of "trade-offs." The "cycle"
is a paradigm derived from the research results suggesting direct
links between heightened customer satisfaction, increased customer
retention, augmented sales and profit, improved quality and
productivity, greater service value per unit of cost, improved
satisfaction of service providers, increased employee retention,
and further heightened customer satisfaction. With detailed
examples and dramatic case studies of Mark Twain Bancshares,
American Airlines, Florida Power & Light, Federal Express,
McDonald's and many other companies, Heskett, Sasser, and Hart show
how this self-reinforcing cycle of behavior differentiates
breakthrough leaders from their "merely good" competitors.
The authors describe how breakthrough managers develop
counterintuitive, even contrarian, strategic service visions. These
companies define their "service concept" in terms of results
achieved for customers rather than services performed. They target
market segments by focusing on
psychographics -- how customers think and behave -- instead of
demographics. And instead of viewing a
service delivery system as a facility where the service is
producted and sold, breakthrough firms see it as an opportunity to
enhance the quality of the service.
These profound differences in thought and action have brought
spectacular results. For managers who wish to set the pace in their
service industries, "Service Breakthroughs" will be essential
reading.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
