The Eternal Truths of Service

The "service revolution" Ron Zemke and I predicted so confidently in our book Service America!: Doing Business in the New Economy, published in 1985, has turned out to be a service evolution, and a slow one at that. Looking beyond all the slogans, campaigns, and hoopla we've been through, it seems that real lasting change in Western management practice has been agonizingly slow. The reasons for that are a topic for another discourse, but nevertheless certain durable lessons have emerged from this uneven success story. I propose to sum them up as follows.

1. Customers seek value, not "service". We've abandoned the obsolete term "customer service", which connotes the trivial, be-nice, smiley-faced attempt to pacify customers. Potential buyers want a total value package, which includes product, price, support, information, and a whole set of contingencies unique to their interests.

2. Small miracles don't count. If you think delivering customer value translates into bottom-line results, think again. There is now clear evidence that small differences in customer-perceived value have little direct impact on customer preference or repurchase behavior. Your value package must be significantly better than the others to win the customer's business.

3. You can't fake customer focus. All the advertising slogans, campaigns, buzzwords, and motivational programs can't mask the contradictions between the real focus of the business and the value proposition sought by the customer. The litmus test of customer focus is fairly simple: is the entire organization, including its work culture and leadership culture, set up to deliver a superior customer experience? Nothing else counts.

4. Most heroic "customer focus" programs fail. Our studies show that the "fizzle factor" for most big-deal organizational campaigns is over 70 percent. It's an easy bet that the typical campaign will fade and die within the typical organizational attention span, which is about six months at most. Sorry if this sounds pessimistic, but truth is truth, and we must deal with it.

5. You don't get customer focus if the leaders don't want it. Many CEOs and senior executives who rattle off the obligatory sound bites about customer focus haven't a clue what it really means, and if they did they'd want no part of it. It's still a relatively rare executive who understands what strategic customer focus demands of him or her, and knows how to model it to the organization.

6. The way your employees feel is ultimately the way your customers will feel. As customers, we sense and respond to the culture of any enterprise we do business with. Whether it's the neighborhood cafe, the telephone company, or the government agency, the core attitudes and beliefs of its culture seep out, sending a subjective message about their attitudes toward us. Strong and healthy cultures send strong and healthy messages to their customers.

7. You can't bottle attitude. The spirit of service is one of the most fragile and perishable of all corporate assets. If not supported by the leadership, the spirit of the culture soon regresses to mediocrity. This is why one-time motivational campaigns seldom succeed. It takes continuous personal attention from the leaders of the organization to build and maintain the kind of morale, energy, commitment, and focus needed to deliver outstanding customer value. This is called service leadership.

8. The manufacturing model won't cut it. We're in the throes of a paradigm transition, which will eventually replace the traditional, introverted Western industrial management model (based on the factory), with a more strategically focused model of value creation and open organizations that interact more fluidly with their environments. The early attempts to apply manufacturing designs such as TQM and ISO 9000 to service quality were an embarrassing failure, as I predicted as early as 1992. We still have a lot of unlearning to do and a lot of new learning to put in its place.

9. Words speak as loudly as actions. We're moving toward a new vocabulary of business. The language used throughout the organization not only signals the mindset, but conversely it forms the mindset. The new language of service management signals concepts like strategic customer focus, strategic partnering, customer-perceived value, value proposition, customer value model, customer value package, service culture, key value drivers, critical value-creating practices, and, of course service leadership.

10. Success is never final. The idea of "customer loyalty" is misguided and dangerous. The most you can do is win a degree of customer preference, which is always temporary. Keeping the edge is at least as difficult as getting it. Some well-known companies have enjoyed a "golden age' of popularity with their customers, only to lose it and slide back into the competitive swamp. It takes a single-minded determination to create better customer value than your rivals, and to keep the focus of the organization on what works and what wins, no matter what.