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Putnam Investments uses technology to enable many of its frontline service providers to work routinely and permanently from their homes. This case explores issues related to this strategy, from conceptualization to implementation and highlighting continuous improvement.

Illustrates how Four Seasons manages hotels in countries with strong and distinct national cultures. Focuses on how the chain meets its exacting service standards in a variety of settings worldwide, with special attention on France.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 803-069.

Commerce Bank has become one of the fastest growing banks in the country, despite having defied conventional wisdom about how to grow deposits. Banks historically have grown either by competing on deposit rates or through acquisitions that expand their deposit base. Commerce has the lowest deposit rates in each of the local markets it serves and has acquired no other banks, yet its growth rate is unparalleled. Its secret? Commerce differentiates itself on service. Explores the highly refined service model that guides the design of its operations and service features and considers the trade-offs involved in competing on service.

The sheer enormity of last year's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon gave new meaning to the term "crisis management." Suddenly, companies near Ground Zero, as well as those more than a thousand miles away, needed a plan. Because the disasters disrupted established channels not only between businesses and customers but between businesses and employees, internal crisis-communications strategies that could be quickly implemented became a key responsibility of top management. Without these strategies, employees' trauma and confusion might have immobilized their firms and set their customers adrift. In this article, executives from a range of industries talk about how their companies, including Morgan Stanley, Oppenheimer Funds, American Airlines, Verizon, the New York Times,Dell, and Starbucks, went about restoring operations and morale. From his interviews with these individuals, author and management professor Paul Argenti was able to distill a number of lessons, each of which, he says, may "serve as guideposts for any company facing a crisis that undermines its employees' composure, confidence, or concentration." His advice to senior executives includes: Maintain high levels of visibility, so that employees are certain of top management's command of the situation and concern; establish contingency communication channels and work sites; strive to keep employees focused on the business itself, because a sense of usefulness enhances morale and good morale enhances usefulness; and ensure that employees have absorbed the firm's values, which will guide them as they cope with the unpredictable. The most forward-thinking leaders realize that managing a crisis-communications program requires the same dedication and resources they give to other dimensions of their business. More important, they realize that their employees always come first.

Explores the highly successful PC and low-end server manufacturer's entry into the large-scale server market in the United States. A key difference of this new market is the intense service element required to support the larger hardware. Specifically, the industry standard is to have a technician onsite with a required part within four hours of problem diagnosis. This type of service presents a problem for Dell, as its potential customers are widely dispersed throughout the United States. Should Dell create an in-house field service team to ensure service quality and maintain control of its customer relationships or outsource the field service to a third-party provider? Complicating the issue is the presence of IBM, the biggest player in the large-scale server market.

Intermountain Health Care (IHC), an integrated delivery system based in Utah, has adopted a new strategy for managing health care delivery. The approach focuses management attention not only on the facilities where care takes place but also on physician decision making and the care process itself, with the aim of boosting physician productivity and improving care quality, while saving money. This case explores the challenges facing Brent James, executive director of the Institute for Health Care Delivery Research at IHC, as he implements new structures and systems (including a data warehouse for care outcomes, electronic patient records, computer workstations, clinical data support systems, and protocols for care) designed to support clinical process management across a geographically diverse group of physicians with varying levels of interest and dedication to IHC. Also highlights an innovative strategy for creating and disseminating knowledge at the individual and organizational levels to maintain high standards in care delivery.

Addresses the question of how to value cash flows in an international context. Focuses on entrepreneurial ventures, but its content applies to finance issues that arise in established multinational enterprises. Addresses cash flows, discount rates, country risk premium, projecting future exchange rates, and other issues. Also contains an extensive example of a software company that exports services to other countries.

Describes the service transformation occurring at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Plagued by a history of poor service, enormous complexity, and an insular employee base, the 100,000-person organization grapples with a turnaround process that attempts to change virtually every aspect of the organization, including IT systems, This case includes information regarding share services organizational structure, organizational culture, and customer service. This case includes information regarding shared services.

Describes how a hotel and leisure company provides high-end service through its distinctive hotels and trains. Provides an opportunity to learn about the company's unusual quality practices and puts into doubt the unquestioned use of well-known practices, such as managing for consistency, offering incentives based on nonfinancial measures, and creating a unified message for a high-end brand. The main dilemma is whether the company should develop a loyalty program across its collection of hotels.

Contains a detailed analysis of Microsoft's financial performance from 1985 to 2001. During this time, Microsoft improved its profitability and cash flow generation--changes that led to a dramatic rise in valuation. Also addresses the issue of determining how much excess profit the company might have earned as a result of its illegal activities, as alleged and proved by the U.S. government.

Covers the evolution of retail real estate in the United States. Specifically covers types of retail centers, such as neighborhood, community, regional, and super-regional as well as the recent phenomenon of the 1990s to 2002 of the growing emergence of value retail, i.e., discount, off-price, and manufacturer outlet retailers.

Product returns have become an increasing burden for makers and sellers of almost every kind of good. But some savvy companies are finding that a good returns-handling system can actually enhance relationships with customers and suppliers--and ultimately boost profits.

It's one thing for people to believe in providing superior customer service; it's quite another to keep busy, ambitious, and largely autonomous managers focused on delivering it. Here's how they did it at Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. When companies first plunged into e-commerce, they thought success meant cutting out middlemen. That approach didn't work, in part because e-businesses misunderstood the role of intermediaries. Middlemen are not costly, necessary evils. They solve problems for customers and, in so doing, enable sales and create value for producers. INSEAD's Philip Anderson and Erin Anderson show how intermediaries are helping smart companies realize the promise of the Web. They explain intermediaries' nine ways of adding value, suggesting that three will change, three will survive in a new form, and three (reducing uncertainty about quality, preserving customer anonymity, and tailoring offerings to customer needs) present growth opportunities. Middlemen can co-opt the Internet by offering services that would be too difficult for individual producers to provide. However, the authors caution, intermediaries must be open to new ways of doing business with suppliers and vice versa. The Web transforms but does not eliminate the advantages of the middleman's central lookout position. But what was once thought of as a straight distribution channel from supplier through middleman to customer is now more accurately described as a service hub. The player that takes the customer order--possibly a Web site--occupies the center and interacts with many partners. The authors specify appropriate, fair incentives (for example, Ethan Allen's quasi-independent furniture stores that customers browse before buying directly from the manufacturer's Web site automatically receive a 10% tip). And they describe service-hub management that will generate enough trust to permit producers to get closer to customers--indirectly.

You can learn a lot from closely observing a business committed to excellent customer service; you can learn even more from actually trying to provide that service. Paul Hemp, an HBR senior editor, spent a week being trained and then working as a room-service waiter at Ritz-Carlton's Boston Common hotel. His tale, though sometimes humbling, offers lessons that managers in any service business might use to improve employee-customer interactions. The author first participated in a two-day orientation program at the Ritz-Carlton, which gave him a chance to learn how the company inculcates its service philosophy in new employees. Upon completion of the program, he went to work, first with a veteran room-service waiter at his side, then on his own. His aim was to put into practice the Ritz-Carlton service precepts, including its motto: "We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen." The author draws a number of conclusions from his experiences. Great service, he finds, should be based on dynamic principles rather than rigid formulas. Also, managers can build employees' emotional commitment to their jobs by emphasizing company traditions. Such commitment serves as a driver of excellent customer service only when employees are empowered to take initiative. And that empowerment has no potency unless employees are motivated to seize it. This depends in part on the kind of people you hire. For one thing, job candidates should exhibit not only concern for others but also genuine empathy--the ability to get inside customers' heads and anticipate their needs and desires.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 602-175.

Consumer auto insurance is a price-sensitive industry in which customers rarely pay a premium to a provider even for additional service features. Progressive spends more on additional service features than its competitors do; consumers don't pay extra for these features, yet the company makes money on a product its competitors often do not. Central to Progressive's success is its ability (a) to turn operational savings into value-added service and (b) to capitalize on its unique competencies through clever service design. Progressive is considering a national rollout of Autograph, a pay-as-you-go insurance service offering that recently completed a successful pilot in Texas.

Designed to familiarize students with the consolidation of highly fragmented labor-dependent service industries, offering insights into service firm growth and the ways services can, and cannot, increase their efficiency and effectiveness. Two frameworks are presented illustrating the sources of benefits and disadvantages of size in consolidations and the important decisions managers must make in designing and executing a consolidation strategy. Intended to give managers insights into the consolidation phenomenon, illustrating the problems plaguing large, labor-dependent service consolidations. These problems explain why so few labor-dependent service consolidations have been successful. A rewritten version of an earlier note.

Explains the financial operations of retail banking, highlighting profitability challenges facing the industry. For U.S. banks, it is quite common for more than half of the customer base to be unprofitable and to have relatively few customers make up the vast majority of profits. Attempts to explain how retail banks generate revenue and incur costs while serving their customer base.