Service Excellence ─ Creating Customer Experiences That Build Relationships

By providing excellent service, organizations build strong relationships with customers, generate barriers to competition, utilize resources more efficiently, and increase profitability. This book provides concepts and tools to help managers:

• Uncover new sources of revenue from innovations and improvements in the customer experience, including leveraging business analytics and metrics;

• Design service processes, operations and channels to create customer experiences that build relationships, as well as design responses to service failures; and

• Manage people, physical evidence, branding and communications to effectively cocreate experiences with customers.

The Customer Experience is the sensory, cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral dimensions of all activities that connect the customer and the organization over time across touch points and channels. It encompasses all activities involving the customer where the organization is the focal object, including prepurchase activities (such as exposure to a website ad), and purchase, consumption, and engagement behaviors (blogging, sharing photos).

This book analyzes the challenges of creating excellent customer experiences, including the management of technology and new media. It describes how customers coproduce and cocreate their experiences, and how these activities influence business revenues and costs. The book takes a deep dive into the psychology of customers, revealing the conceptual building blocks of customer experiences and how they build relationships over time. These ideas provide a business perspective on how to manage relationships with customers to generate cash flows and profitability, including the role of pricing.