Expanding Customerservice As A Profit Center

Striving for excellence in customer service is to gain the competitive advantage. It is the keystone for the business to grow and prosper in the right direction so that it builds through repetitive sales to existing customers and referrals to potential customers. If you were to look at customer service in your organization as a major business component and all customers are treated with excellence prior to the sale, during the sale, and after the sale, customer service will become a profit center that builds sales dollars to the top line and real profits to the bottom line. This book can help you and any organization manager achieve customer service excellence with its basic principle of doing the right thing at the right time for the right customers. It can also assist in building organizations with strong customer bases and sales loyalty. The author smartly gives you real practical “how tos” in providing excellent customer service in all aspects of your operations by doing the right thing despite the counter pressure within your organization. As many businesses are struggling to be competitive, or merely to survive, this book is your primer or “how to” for identifying and maintaining customer service excellence in all operational areas on the path to developing a learning organization. No matter what type of business—this book can be a learning, coaching, and mentoring tool in your quest to make the delivery of customer service the best possible in today’s ever changing business environment.

Striving for excellence in customer service is to gain the competitive advantage. It is the keystone for the business to grow and prosper in the right direction so that it builds through repetitive sales to existing customers and referrals to potential customers. If you were to look at customer service in your organization as a major business component and all customers are treated with excellence prior to the sale, during the sale, and after the sale, customer service will become a profit center that builds sales dollars to the top line and real profits to the bottom line. This book can help you and any organization manager achieve customer service excellence with its basic principle of doing the right thing at the right time for the right customers. It can also assist in building organizations with strong customer bases and sales loyalty. The author smartly gives you real practical "how tos" in providing excellent customer service in all aspects of your operations by doing the right thing despite the counter pressure within your organization. As many businesses are struggling to be competitive, or merely to survive, this book is your primer or "how to" for identifying and maintaining customer service excellence in all operational areas on the path to developing a learning organization. No matter what type of business- this book can be a learning, coaching, and mentoring tool in your quest to make the delivery of customer service the best possible in today's ever changing business environment.

In this pathbreaking book, world-renowned Harvard Business School service firm experts James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr. and Leonard A. Schlesinger reveal that leading companies stay on top by managing the service profit chain. Why are a select few service firms better at what they do -- year in and year out -- than their competitors? For most senior managers, the profusion of anecdotal "service excellence" books fails to address this key question. Based on five years of painstaking research, the authors show how managers at American Express, Southwest Airlines, Banc One, Waste Management, USAA, MBNA, Intuit, British Airways, Taco Bell, Fairfield Inns, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the Merry Maids subsidiary of ServiceMaster employ a quantifiable set of relationships that directly links profit and growth to not only customer loyalty and satisfaction, but to employee loyalty, satisfaction, and productivity. The strongest relationships the authors discovered are those between (1) profit and customer loyalty; (2) employee loyalty and customer loyalty; and (3) employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Moreover, these relationships are mutually reinforcing; that is, satisfied customers contribute to employee satisfaction and vice versa. Here, finally, is the foundation for a powerful strategic service vision, a model on which any manager can build more focused operations and marketing capabilities. For example, the authors demonstrate how, in Banc One's operating divisions, a direct relationship between customer loyalty measured by the "depth" of a relationship, the number of banking services a customer utilizes, and profitability led the bank to encourage existing customers to further extend the bank services they use. Taco Bell has found that their stores in the top quadrant of customer satisfaction ratings outperform their other stores on all measures. At American Express Travel Services, offices that ticket quickly and accurately are more profitable than those which don't. With hundreds of examples like these, the authors show how to manage the customer-employee "satisfaction mirror" and the customer value equation to achieve a "customer's eye view" of goods and services. They describe how companies in any service industry can (1) measure service profit chain relationships across operating units; (2) communicate the resulting self-appraisal; (3) develop a "balanced scorecard" of performance; (4) develop a recognitions and rewards system tied to established measures; (5) communicate results company-wide; (6) develop an internal "best practice" information exchange; and (7) improve overall service profit chain performance. What difference can service profit chain management make? A lot. Between 1986 and 1995, the common stock prices of the companies studied by the authors increased 147%, nearly twice as fast as the price of the stocks of their closest competitors. The proven success and high-yielding results from these high-achieving companies will make The Service Profit Chain required reading for senior, division, and business unit managers in all service companies, as well as for students of service management.

This workbook coaches business leaders to magnify the profits of a business. They learn a unique scientific system for predicting and achieving results. Their systematic decisions will spark the profits of any business. This system comprises all strategic decisions in the marketing plan for a business. The first part uses the SWOT Analysis to assess its strengths and weaknesses and identify possible opportunities and threats. The SWOT Analysis clarifies the mission, target market, specialty, and suppliers of the business. The questions at the end of these four chapters guide business leaders to focus on quality, describe key customers, compete on strength, and delegate weaknesses. The next part positions the business relative to its competitors with marketing mix decisions. Business leaders specify its products and services, and how to distribute, promote, and price them. These four chapters close with questions that lead the business to offer treasures, deliver delight, trumpet empathy, and price as valued. The final part motivates them to implement their decisions. The closÂing questions motivate business leaders to target key prospects, reward the best, concentrate resources, and jump into action. These twelve decisions transform a marketing plan and build the business. Her unique scientific system coaches business leaders to use the 80/20 rule to magnify their profits.

Marketers, merchandisers, and sales executives alike are struggling with Big Data - the data streaming at increasing speeds from myriad channels and options for communicating with customers. The tools are likely to continue to multiply, paralyzing many executives with simply too many choices. Using data from a four-year study, this book provides a process for rigorous decision making, eliminating the paralysis and optimizing decision making for marketing performance. This book is intended for a broad audience including students and professors in graduate business schools, and practicing business executives. The goal is to inform marketing practice and help current and future business leaders navigate through the competitive storms unleashed by technological change.

Over the past several years, leading companies have entered a period of major marketing and operational adjustment and convergence, or intersection. It’s a reaction to a critical fact of life: Customers—not organizations— now control the decision-making dynamics and how organizations are perceived. We are witnessing significant multichannel media application (and resultant omnichannel access by consumers), along with more effective and pervasive customer data gathering, analysis, and modeling. If you’re observing these major shifts in your own organization, you’ll need this book. Inside, you’ll learn how to build proactive customer communication, improve relationships, drive positive brand perception, optimize channel selection and message personalization, and enhance employee-related factors (hiring, training, reward, recognition), all leading to superior customer experience and a customercentric culture. In addition, the author has incorporated content on “Big Data” generation and analytics, which you’ll master while scoring a direct hit to the moving target—your continuously changing, and increasingly independent, customer base.

What is customer orientation? And how does it fit in your idea of a good marketing strategy? This book can help you understand more about the relationships, applications, and steps to take to drive continuous relationships with customers to aid in the process of defining and implementing niche strategies, international marketing efforts, and electronic commerce. Inside, the authors start with classic marketing concepts and then review important developments and research of the latest findings (both from the theoretical and applied points of view) to present specific examples, methodologies, policy measures, and strategies that can be implemented to increase and perfect customer satisfaction. Both manufacturing and service businesses are addressed, and the results will give you a combination of the major studies in this specific field of marketing and strategy to offer a comprehensive strategic tool for decision makers in organizations.

Smart Marketing is designed to help organizations looking for significant growth. Offering a great product or service does not guarantee success—to win these days, a business must also excel at marketing and selling. In most instances, a big marketing team and budget also isn’t necessary. To achieve big goals, focus must be put on the most important marketing and sales activities that generate the biggest impact for the business. This book outlines what those activities are and how to implement them. This book will appeal to CEOs, business owners, and independent professionals. It will also be very useful for marketers and sales managers. It is a “how to” guide to help readers cut through the hype and get straight to what really matters to this audience—growing business and revenue.