Answer:
Subscribe
Sign In
Customer Service
The Four Things a Service Business Must Get Right
by Frances X. Frei
From the April 2008 Issue
As the world’s major economies have matured, they have become dominated by service-focused businesses. But many of the management tools and techniques that service managers use were designed to tackle the challenges of product companies. Are these sufficient, or do we need new ones?
Let me submit that some new tools are necessary. When a business takes a product to market, whether it’s a basic commodity like corn or a highly engineered offering like a digital camera, the company must make the product itself compelling and also field a workforce capable of producing it at an attractive price. To be sure, neither job is easy to do well; enormous amounts of management attention and academic research have been devoted to these challenges. But delivering a service entails something else as well: the management of customers, who are not simply consumers of the service but can also be integral to its production. And because customers’ involvement as producers can wreak havoc on costs, service companies must also develop creative ways to fund their distinctive advantages.
Any of these four elements—the offering or its funding mechanism, the employee management system or the customer management system—can be the undoing of a service business. This is amply demonstrated by my analysis of service companies that have struggled over the past decade. What is just as clear, however, is that there is no “right” way to combine the elements. The appropriate design of any one of them depends upon the other three. When we look at service businesses that have grown and prospered—companies like Wal-Mart in retail, Commerce Bank in banking, and the Cleveland Clinic in health care—it is their effective integration of the elements that stands out more than the cleverness of any element in isolation.
Explanation:
haba Po sorry
