The Service Profit Chain

As a former student of Heskett's and Sasser's in the early '70's, I have followed their research in the field of service management. As a student and consulting practioner of "high performance service management" for 18 years, I have over 50 books in my library on "service management" with publication dates going back to 1976. This book provides not only a refined summary of all of the best service management theories, but it breaks new ground as far as making a new service order happen within a business. If you want to truly achieve - distinctive and sustained levels of service, lower total costs, higher everyday margins, and happier, more loyal employees and customers, then this book is for you. It is well written and organized, but it is a process book instead of one with a lot of quick-fix, anecdotal stories that have been unproductively popular for too long. You will have to work intellectually to get through this book, but you will be conceptually re-oriented down the right path towards true competitive advantage. The book does update and improve on the authors' own research and publishing - notably Heskett's book entitled "Service Breakthroughs" (Free Press, 1990). In the "what's new" department, what I liked best was the third part of the book sub-titled "Putting It All Together". To go from a top-down, financial management company to a bottom-up, service excellence performer takes a total transformation starting with the dated, unspoken core assumptions or beliefs of the CEO. The authors illustrate with case studies that big change is necessary for big gain, but it most often will involve some big pain. They do an excellent job, however, of preparing the would be change artist for the transformational bumps ahead. D. Bruce Merrifield, Jr [email protected] [...]

This reference is a bit dated but the case studies given herein are valuable examples of how customer service can boost an organization's market position. Unfortunately the author goes back to the well on the same few case studies repeatedly. This is a book that could stand some better editing in a much needed updated edition.

I will not be buying books from my school again! These prices were perfect for all of my school bikes and it's the exact same book as my teacher requested via our class syllabus. This book helped me to understand more about the service profit chain as it was a major topic of discussion during my school semester. This book was 159 dollars cheaper than the price my college book store was charging!

I needed this book for a class I’m taking. The book was new and arrived on time.

The multiple examples that use about 50% of the book's volumes are lengthy, tedious and at times redundant. This book would have been as valuable if it occupied half the number of pages. Also, whoever edited the book needs to know that 'insure' is the act of providing insurance, whereas 'ensure' is the act of verifying or 'making sure'.

The Kindle edition of this book is crippled as the key charts and graphics, including the complex graphic supporting the Service Profit Chain, are essentially unreadable on either the Kindle device or the iPad. The graphics look like very (very!) low resolution scans, with low contrast, and about 3pt type. I assume the publisher is responsible for the quality of the translation to the ebook format. For this type of book, where visual models are a critical part of the content, the poor quality is simply inexcusable.

No complaints..

thanks

If you interested in customer experience management (CX), here is one of the original pieces of work. It is so full of information which has been picked up and evolved in many of the new CX books you find today. So if you are interested in much of the original thinking around CX you will find it here. It is funny to see BA referenced here so often for the work they have done to improve there CX in the 90’s, certainly with euro traveler how far backwards they have gone nowadays.My one issue is the book is not easy to read, it is rather written for academics than the lay person. Also, frequently there are convoluted sentences which contain huge amounts thinking, which other authors may write paragraphs of even entire chapters on. But here they can be easily lost if you are not concentrating heavily at all times whilst reading

Book required for University studies. Given that THIS was the EXACT book required I learned lots from it and it came in very useful when writing essays and reports, not only for one class but for several!

Very good approach to the employees roles and their empowerment, as Internal customer of the companies, in order to get external customer satisfaction