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Tag Archives: service excellence
Truth #2: Someone has to pay for it
Service excellence must be funded in some way. Either find a palatable way to charge your customers more, reduce costs while improving your service experience, or get customers to do some of the work for you. Case: FedEx By empowering …
Lean Thinking at Starbucks
The WSJ wrote an article about the recent adoption of “lean thinking” at Starbucks. Lean thinking is a philosophy popularized by Toyota’s famous Toyota Production System (TPS) that emphasizes rooting out waste in its many forms. At Toyota, waste might be excess …
Service Showdown at the Four Seasons
The NYT described some recent challenges at the Four Seasons. Among them is healthy tension in the underlying business model, which separates asset ownership from service management. The Four Seasons — a management company that owns none of its hotels …
Service Excellence Defined (and Illustrated)
Service excellence can be hard to define — it often falls into the “know it when I see it” category of vague, but important distinctions. Part of the challenge is the subjectivity of a word like excellence. Not all customers …
Extreme Customer Service
BusinessWeek’s cover story this week is called Extreme Customer Service. The title has an aspirational ring to it, and the article celebrates examples of “extreme service,” including a UPS delivery person who is instructed by his president to defy the …
Seeking Exceptional Service Providers
We are looking for examples of exceptional service providers, preferably those with innovative models and/or those that are unheralded in the press. If you have a suggestion, please post as a comment or email me directly ffrei@hbs.edu. Thank you!