Service America

In this world of technological commerce customer loyalty is waning. This guide, using innovative techniques and methodologies combined with real-life examples, provides insight into strategies to confront the either do it bigger or do it better imperative and the truth of what service means.

In this book, an entrepreneur and CEO of a major technology company shares original service concepts that will enable any company to keep customers coming back. What distinguishes America's Service Meltdown: Restoring Service Excellence in the Age of the Customer is its striking originality and applicability to businesses of nearly every type and size. Based on the author's extensive personal and professional experience, the book offers a straightforward, no nonsense model that clearly explains how to organize the modern enterprise for the delivery of service excellence. Customer-oriented companies can operate more effectively, Raul Pupo argues, by focusing on the critical success factors of service: leadership that unequivocally believes they are in business to serve the customer; a business-planning process centered around the customer; an organizational ethic of service up and down the ranks; and an empowered, motivated, and competent frontline organization. Readers will discover what it takes to serve customers superbly, how excellent customer service profoundly improves profitability, and how to identify the biggest obstacles to good service. Most importantly, they will be rewarded with concrete instructions that will enable them to deliver topnotch customer service every step of the way.

Reproduction of the original.

This collection of papers was presented at the World Bank Conference on 'Civil service reform in Latin America and the Caribbean', held in 1993. The goal of the conference was to promote the flow of ideas among researchers and practitioners in the civil s

From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin edit a collection of new research on this understudied workforce. Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether certain groups deserve premium pay for their irreplaceable work and sacrifices or if serving the greater good is a reward unto itself. Contributors: Eileen Boris, Cathleen D. Cahill, Frederick W. Gooding Jr., William P. Jones, Francis Ryan, Jon Shelton, Joseph E. Slater, Katherine Turk, Eric S. Yellin, and Amy Zanoni