What is the one thing that all businesses depend on? Customers. What could be more important, then, to your organization's enduring success than a solid, well-planned and executed customer service strategy--a philosophy and culture that show customers that they are the reason you are in business in the first place? As this book reveals, we are all in the business of serving customers, whether they be external or internal to your organization. It therefore behooves each of us to understand and practice the principles of service excellence. Managing Service Excellence is a comprehensive guidebook for creating and maintaining a customer-centric organization. Through chapters focusing on specific skill sets, real-world examples, and review questions, this book details how to create a satisfied customer and keep them for life. In clear, accessible language, Crutcher covers every aspect of service--from effective planning, communication, teaming, and coaching strategies, to managing change, strengthening critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and leveraging customer feedback to drive business improvement and innovation. With extensive experience in C-level and higher education roles, Crutcher helps us understand what customers really want and need, what drives their individual behavior, and how to best customize our service approach accordingly. In a world where technology is constantly changing the business landscape, this book serves as a timeless resource on the fundamentals of customer service. There will never be a substitute for the competitive advantage that integrity, competence, and relationship-building provide. As Crutcher writes, "If you build it, they will come" may work in the movies, but in real life, success requires a consistent effort in the field of customer service. Managing Service Excellence provides the keys.

As the service sectors play an increasingly important role in all economies worldwide, service executives and professionals are well advised to recognize two main pathways to achieving sustainable success in services. The first path requires enhancing the strategic differentiation and operational excellence of their service enterprises; the second requires that these executives and their employees develop the knowledge and skills needed to achieve such success. Specifically, this book discusses actionable methodologies needed to generate creative ideas, including deciding on which ones to pursue; on how to justify projects financially; on how to manage the development projects for innovative services; and on how to reach out to customers and offer them superior service support.

The purpose of this book is to provide cutting-edge information on service management such as the role services play in an economy, service strategy, ethical issues in services and service supply chains. It also covers basic topics of operations management including linear and goal programming, project management, inventory management and forecasting.This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to services and operational management challenges; it draws upon the theory and practice in many fields of study such as economics, management science, statistics, psychology, sociology, ethics and technology, to name a few. It contains chapters most textbooks do not include, such as ethics, management of public and non-profit service organizations, productivity and measurement of performance, routing and scheduling of service vehicles.An Instructor's Solutions Manual is available upon request for all instructors who adopt this book as a course text. Please send your request to [email protected].

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 pre-purchase 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 co-produce and co-create 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.

If you’ve heard and read all you want to know about how bad service is in the world and how important service is to customers and to your bottom line, you may be ready for a little action. After many recent articles and books dealing with the need for quality service, few business managers remain unconvinced. Many, however, remain unequipped to express their commitment in action. The mission of this book is to equip the already convinced to implement the already proved: service is a strategy as powerful as marketing and as potent as a quality product itself in the ongoing effort to realize the full profit potential of a company. This book gives you detailed, step-by-step knowledge that you can use in establishing profitable customer service strategies. The profit-producing capability of an organization derives from impressions made by all employees on the organization’s customers. The means of creating these impressions are the quality and efficacy of the product or service that the employees sell: the quality, accuracy, dependability, and speed of their service — and the warmth of their human relationships with customers. Training and motivation for people who actually deliver service and how-to-do-it implementation instructions are the twin I-beams supporting the substance of this book. They are: The reason this book was written. The features that distinguish this book from other books on service. Among key benefits to readers of this book are: Hands-on ideas, skills, and techniques that can be used immediately. Knowledge about shaping employee attitudes, a powerful competitive force moving a firm toward greater market share, customer loyalty, and profitability.

In three years Livingston helped the 17,000- employee strong Crossmark increase its sales revenues by 30 percent and add an additional 2,400 workers Livingston will promote the book on his busy speaking tour, which includes keynote addresses at several large consumer products information conferences Includes numerous on-the-street examples and case studies throughout the book

This open access book is an outcome of several years of research, practice, and teaching experience of the authors on the challenges that underpin the successful switch to services for manufacturing firms. Ideal for a student as well as a practitioner, the book describes the industrial services ecosystem, the barriers and challenges, and a roadmap for building service excellence. Curated cases are used to describe the current approaches in practice to overcome the barriers. The book also provides several tools, each with a short introduction, that the authors have used successfully in projects to help overcome the servitization barriers. Many of these tools are from management, design thinking, or service design. The service excellence roadmap is based on the development methodology and helps current and future business leaders to create their own individual roadmaps.

The world’s bestselling Lean expert shows service-based organizations how to go Lean, gain value, and get results—The Toyota Way. A must-read for service professionals of every level, this essential book takes the proven Lean principles of the bestselling Toyota Way series and applies them directly to the industries where quality of service is crucial for success. Jeff Liker and Karyn Ross show you how to develop Lean practices throughout your organization using the famous 4P model. Whether you are an executive, manager, consultant, or frontline worker who deals with customers every day, you’ll learn how take advantage of all Lean has to offer. With this book as your guide, you’ll gain a clear understanding of Lean and discover the principles, practices and tools needed to develop people and processes that surprise and delight each of your customers. These ground-tested techniques are designed to help you make continuous improvements in your services, streamline your operations, and add ever-increasing value to your customers. Fascinating case studies of Lean-driven success in a range of service industries, including healthcare, insurance, financial services, and telecommunications, illustrate that Lean principles and practices work as well in services as they do in manufacturing. Drawn from original research and real-world examples, The Toyota Way to Service Excellence will help you make the leap to Lean.

Every retailer knows that the key to their success is excellent customer service, but given the transient nature of sales staff this is sometimes hard to achieve. The book is divided into four sections: 1) The business: how to secure the belief and buy-in of the senior team/owner to commit to a sales and service culture. 2) The people: how to recruit, develop and reward frontline salespeople. 3) The environment: delivering the back-up required from those working behind the scenes. 4) The sale: how to make the most of every sales and service opportunity. This book shows readers how to embed a service culture that will make the most of every customer interaction to promote long-term business success.