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Service Excellence in Organizations, Eight Key Steps to Follow and Achieve It, is a two-volume book published by Business Expert Press in 2019 and written by Fiona Urquhart, who leads Durham University's MBA module on service excellence and has consulted for an array of service and manufacturing organizations. Volume I deals with the basic tenets of service excellence, while Volume II suggests mechanisms, tools, and techniques to help embed to excellence as the foundation of value that the organization delivers. Both contain practical examples used by well-known companies; both also contain a self-assessment diagnostic tool that enables organizations to identify where they have built significant strengths in terms of service excellence and where opportunities to enhance their operations exist. In the first volume, the second chapter considers how the brand entices by drawing the customer into a relationship. It addresses questions such as: the role branding plays for company, staff, and customer and its link to service excellence; how to develop engaging brands; how to use the brand throughout the consumer decision-making process to strengthen the customer relationship; what the role a company's core values play in brand development; and how to surface those core values.

Thanks to technologies that enable constant, customized interactions, businesses are building deeper ties with their customers. Firms can now address customer needs the moment they arise--and sometimes even earlier. By employing "connected strategies," companies are dramatically improving their customers' experiences, boosting their own operational efficiencies, and gaining competitive advantage. In their research the authors have identified four effective connected strategies: "Respond to desire," which entails filling customers' requests quickly and seamlessly; "curated offering," or presenting personally tailored recommendations; "coach behavior," or reminding people of needs and goals and nudging them to act; and "automatic execution," or anticipating what people want and delivering it without even being asked. To get the most out of these strategies, firms must understand customers' privacy preferences, build new capabilities, and use the learning from repeated interactions to shape future ones.

Researchers have learned to mine a unique set of data that serves as a slow-motion replay of how an organization and its people function: the company's e-mail. Although e-mail analysis has largely focused on internal communications, a new study uses it to examine how employees interact with clients. Researchers studied the e-mail behaviors of teams working with key client accounts at a global professional services firm. Each month during the study, team leaders attended a "virtual mirroring" session in which they were shown key metrics from their team's e-mails--measures of such things as the simplicity of language in the subject line and the speed of responses to client messages. The feedback from these sessions led to positive changes in team members' e-mail behavior and boosted client satisfaction. In an accompanying Q&A, the firm's head of innovation discusses the research and the company's response.

The case describes the challenges related to topline enhancement faced by Sparsh Nephrocare, a growing chain of dialysis centers in India. In the early years of its operations (2010-2015), Sparsh grew mainly by opening new centers and focused on cost leadership to maintain profitability. However, as Sparsh's founders, Gaurav Porwal and Saurav Panda, look to raise Series B funding, they are faced with the challenge of how to fuel the next phase of growth at the existing centers. Any option worth investigating must ensure that the company's relationships with various stakeholders in a fragmented ecosystem are not adversely affected. This includes ensuring good outcomes for patients and preserving the autonomy of nephrologists and the importance of the hospitals that house these dialysis centers.

Spreadsheet supplement for case ISB131.

SM-315 Michelin Group is told from the perspective of Florent Menegaux, COO of Michelin, and other senior leaders at the company. Michelin had recently undergone a company wide reorganization, and Menegaux was tasked with how to maintain the company's relevance and competitiveness in a changing global marketplace, particularly as customer needs and expectations around service were becoming more specific and demanding. Given that Michelin was a large French company with a long operating history, Menegaux and others pondered what would the best approach be to implementing changes throughout the company to adapt to a more digital and customer-centric business landscape while still preserving and embracing the company's rich culture and proud history. One necessary element was the need to hire more "entrepreneurial" talent from outside the company (as opposed to the company's tendency to promote from within) in order to pursue several initiatives outside, but still related to, the core tire business.

Headspace in 2018 examines the company as it charts a new trajectory. The case follows the point of view of Randhir Vieira, Head of Product at Headspace, and dives into several challenges and opportunities from a Product Manager's perspective. Topics include boosting customer retention rates, finding and testing key metrics, incorporating new technologies, employing the "jobs to be done framework," and evolving the platform.

Bahwan CyberTek (BCT) was an IP-enabled technology company founded in 1999 by Sheikah Hind Bahwan (Hind) and S. Durgaprasad (DP). Over the years, it had grown into a global provider of innovative software products and services and had become a $275 million group with more than 2,950 business and technology professionals. BCT was privately held, based in Chennai, India, with operations in the United States, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. BCT had worked with more than 1,000 customers, including Fortune 500 companies, and delivered its innovative software solutions to companies in North America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. In 2016, BCT began to seriously ponder how it could carve out an identity for itself in the digital space, thereby leveraging and capitalizing on the great and growing amount of knowledge it had created. "From day one we were building our IP," said Hind, "and that is why we are consolidating all our knowledge in the separate company, and that is the company that will go public or get investors: dt360. It is already registered as a separate company. So we have now restructured and are moving forward." In addition to establishing a home for its growing IP, BCT also wanted to build an entity that could best deliver transformation value to its clients along with the capability to scale fast with state-of-the-art and emerging technologies. And, it wanted to enable its own workforce to embrace these new technologies, thereby keeping them current and relevant in the rapidly evolving market. So, with these multiple potential benefits in mind, BCT officially established dt360 (the name was intended to represent digital transformation across 360 degrees) as a wholly owned subsidiary in late 2017. In 2018, BCT's top management was considering the strategic and organizational challenges they confronted in further developing and leading the newly formed company.

Customer service jobs are notoriously joyless, and callers' experiences with reps can be just as unsatisfying. But T-Mobile has a new operating model that's making both employees and customers happier. There are no rows of service agents robotically responding to random calls as quickly as possible. Instead, T-Mobile relies on colocated, collaborative teams of reps who manage specific accounts in a given locale, with a focus on autonomous problem solving. Reps get more-comprehensive training, managers get more time for coaching, and team members are evaluated on group performance as well as individual performance. Additionally, teams are authorized and expected to manage their own P&L statements. The results are impressive: In three years, T-Mobile has dramatically reduced its customer churn rate, cost to serve, and employee attrition and absenteeism. Its Net Promoter Score is way up too. Other companies might likewise benefit from similar efforts to rethink standard industry practices.

In 1984, when the Boston Beer Company's Samuel Adams Boston Lager was first sold, founder Jim Koch had helped ignite a craft beer movement by making small-batch premium beers in an era of industry consolidation. By 2018, Boston Beer was a publicly traded company that continued to distinguish itself as a craft brewer while brewing millions of barrels per year and managing a diverse product portfolio including ciders and hard seltzers. That year, new CEO hire Dave Burwick faced a range of questions: (1) How to manage a company with a board chairman (Koch) whose name was synonymous with the company, and who continued to hold decisive voting control in the company's dual-class stock structure, (2) How to balance Boston Beer's commitment to craft beer quality with an increasingly sprawling portfolio, and (3) What specific changes to make to company operations to increase efficiency while maintaining focus on quality.

One of the most important goals in healthcare today is reducing costs while maintaining high-quality care. This article focuses on a triadic relationship that is responsible for a significant amount of nonlabor spending in hospitals: physician preference items. The triadic relationship among salespeople, physicians, and hospitals' supply managers has a direct influence on costs. Regarding some key purchases, the physician-salesperson relationship is closer than the physician-supply manager relationship-even though the latter two entities work for and within the same company and strive for the same mission. This reality creates a type of conflict that is perplexing to solve and costly to ignore. To better understand the sources of friction and opportunities for collaboration in this triad, personnel across hospitals, suppliers, and healthcare consortiums were interviewed. Herein, we introduce strategies to help resolve the conflict. It is essential that hospital supply managers continually negotiate for best solutions that consider both long-run costs and quality of patient care. Yet, salesperson motivations and close salesperson-physician relationships place barriers that prevent negotiations more common to other areas of spending. The strategies offered in this article highlight ways to mute negative and amplify positive effects of the physician-salesperson relationship.

Economic growth and a rising middle class consumer base make emerging markets an attractive prospect for many international businesses. Changing patterns of retail in these countries present opportunities for business expansion that many are keen to capitalize on, but also present challenges for reaching their ambitions. This article examines the growth of the coffee shop industry in China-considering its key dynamics and drivers-in order to address questions about successful retail expansion in emerging markets. We aim to explore how changing consumer cultures have contributed to a rapidly growing industry and what strategies businesses have used to enter the market and maintain growth, as well as considerations for potential retail success in the future.

Product returns are both a challenge and an opportunity for most retailers, since more than US$640 billion in revenue is lost each year because of preventable product returns. A major impediment to unlocking the full potential of these returns is the firm's returns management program: the policies governing the customer-firm exchange process. Recent insights from research and practice have yielded the unprecedented opportunity to open the "black box" of developing effective programs. Yet, such development must address three main questions: What types of returns management programs exist? What misunderstandings impede returns management effectiveness? How can retailers develop effective programs? This article distinguishes among different types of returns management programs and discusses the managerial misunderstandings that reduce their effectiveness. It presents a framework for developing, implementing, and controlling effective programs that allow retailers to boost sales, reduce returns, and increase profitability.

John Chow, the owner of Café Betterfield (CBF), is a food gourmet and a passionate entrepreneur. CBF offers a wide spread of food options, and this was a big draw for many of its regular customers. With these strengths, Chow was puzzled by the lacklustre and irregular profitability of the cafe. Mandy Lim, the newly-hired manager of CBF, was tasked to investigate and find solutions to the current problems.

The first rule of customer service--when something goes wrong, apologize--can backfire. New research based, uniquely, on videos of actual customer interactions shows that after a point, apologies only heighten unhappy customers' frustration. Employees should worry less about displaying empathy and instead focus on creative, energetic attempts to solve the problem at hand.

An Indian hospital creates a new customer liaison role--the patient care executive--but as its rate of attrition for physicians rises in an extremely tight talent market, leaders begin to wonder whether friction between the PCEs and doctors is the problem. This fictional case study features expert commentary by Rana Awdish, Ashutosh Raghuvanshi.

An Indian hospital creates a new customer liaison role--the patient care executive--but as its rate of attrition for physicians rises in an extremely tight talent market, leaders begin to wonder whether friction between the PCEs and doctors is the problem. This fictional case study features expert commentary by Rana Awdish, Ashutosh Raghuvanshi.

An Indian hospital creates a new customer liaison role--the patient care executive--but as its rate of attrition for physicians rises in an extremely tight talent market, leaders begin to wonder whether friction between the PCEs and doctors is the problem. This fictional case study features expert commentary by Rana Awdish, Ashutosh Raghuvanshi.

In 2016, the German utility RWE undertook a carve-out in which substantial parts of the company's assets and liabilities were offered to the general public as part of an IPO. The case describes the developments in the German energy landscape that led RWE to this unusual move. The case also examines how investors responded to this carve-out in terms of the valuations attached to RWE and the new subsidiary.

Clover Network's founders didn't see the curveball coming at the end of 2012. The two-year-old start-up had just nine employees. It had dumped its first business idea, pivoted from its second, and was working hard on a new product: a tablet-based cash register with built-in credit card processing. Large credit card payment processing companies had started noticing Clover and one had just agreed to pre-order $2 million of Clover hardware. It was Clover's first such deal. But around Thanksgiving, Clover learned that First Data-the card processing industry's 800-pound gorilla-also was interested in Clover's technology. If it could bring First Data on as a customer, Clover would have a pipeline to a huge number of retailers. In early December, one of Clover's founders received a 2½-page letter from First Data. He had expected a proposal to buy and distribute Clover equipment, maybe with a small equity investment. Instead, First Data said it wanted to acquire "no less than 75 percent" of Clover, and close the deal by December 31. Was it time to sell Clover? The case highlights how a start-up decides to respond to an unexpected buyout offer and how it proposes to structure the deal.