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The Brave New Service Strategy

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The Brave New Service Strategy

Aligning Customer Relationships, Market Strategies and Business Structures

AMACOM,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Text available

What's inside?

If you don’t have a relationship with your customers, the worst thing you can do is fake it.

Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Well Structured

Recommendation

Barbara A. Gutek and Theresa Welsh believe that companies can improve their relationships with customers if they find the approach that best fits their business. The authors emphasize the difference between real relationships - ongoing, personal contacts between a customer and an individual service provider - and mere encounters - where the customer’s relationship is with the company and a random variety of service employees. Many companies confuse the two, trying to turn encounters into relationships, and ending up with pseudo-relationships that alienate customers. Instead, realistically determine what you offer customers and what customers want, and then adjust your systems or policies accordingly. This excellent book provides executives and business owners with an insightful analytical framework for understanding customer relationships. While clear and well organized, it is sometimes repetitious - perhaps to be sure we all get the idea - but getAbstract recommends it highly for the soundness of its concepts, if not the economy of its prose.

Summary

Customer COPS

Your business’s customer service relationship is based on three components - the customer, the organization, and the provider of the service - creating the COPS model (Customer-Organization-Provider). The model takes a little explaining, in that these three elements form a triangle with the organization (O) at the top and the Customer (C) and Provider (P) at the bottom corners. You can structure your business to have tight or loose links between any two components (C-O, O-P and C-P) and to produce excellent service as a natural result of this structure.

To design the structure that best fits your business, recognize the difference between the two basic ways that customers and providers interact. They either have an encounter or a relationship. In an encounter, the customer receives the service from whomever is available, such as a store clerk in a store or customer service telephone representative, whether or not the customer knows the organization itself (such as with an HMO or a discount broker like Charles Schwab) or the service person.

In a relationship, the customer and provider know each other as individuals. They are either in regular contact...

About the Authors

Barbara A. Gutek  s a professor in the Department of Management and Policy at the Eller College of Business and Public Administration at the University of Arizona. She has been a consultant to companies and government agencies. She has written several books, including Sex in the Workplace and The Dynamics of Service. Theresa Welsh  has written numerous articles for popular publications and worked as a writer and editor for more than 10 years.

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