• Complain

W. Earl Sasser Jr. - The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value

Here you can read online W. Earl Sasser Jr. - The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 1997, publisher: Free Press, genre: Business. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover

The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

In this pathbreaking book, world-renowned Harvard Business School service firm experts James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr. and Leonard A. Schlesinger reveal that leading companies stay on top by managing the service profit chain.
Why are a select few service firms better at what they do -- year in and year out -- than their competitors? For most senior managers, the profusion of anecdotal service excellence books fails to address this key question. Based on five years of painstaking research, the authors show how managers at American Express, Southwest Airlines, Banc One, Waste Management, USAA, MBNA, Intuit, British Airways, Taco Bell, Fairfield Inns, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the Merry Maids subsidiary of ServiceMaster employ a quantifiable set of relationships that directly links profit and growth to not only customer loyalty and satisfaction, but to employee loyalty, satisfaction, and productivity. The strongest relationships the authors discovered are those between (1) profit and customer loyalty; (2) employee loyalty and customer loyalty; and (3) employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Moreover, these relationships are mutually reinforcing; that is, satisfied customers contribute to employee satisfaction and vice versa.
Here, finally, is the foundation for a powerful strategic service vision, a model on which any manager can build more focused operations and marketing capabilities. For example, the authors demonstrate how, in Banc Ones operating divisions, a direct relationship between customer loyalty measured by the depth of a relationship, the number of banking services a customer utilizes, and profitability led the bank to encourage existing customers to further extend the bank services they use. Taco Bell has found that their stores in the top quadrant of customer satisfaction ratings outperform their other stores on all measures. At American Express Travel Services, offices that ticket quickly and accurately are more profitable than those which dont. With hundreds of examples like these, the authors show how to manage the customer-employee satisfaction mirror and the customer value equation to achieve a customers eye view of goods and services. They describe how companies in any service industry can (1) measure service profit chain relationships across operating units; (2) communicate the resulting self-appraisal; (3) develop a balanced scorecard of performance; (4) develop a recognitions and rewards system tied to established measures; (5) communicate results company-wide; (6) develop an internal best practice information exchange; and (7) improve overall service profit chain performance.
What difference can service profit chain management make? A lot. Between 1986 and 1995, the common stock prices of the companies studied by the authors increased 147%, nearly twice as fast as the price of the stocks of their closest competitors. The proven success and high-yielding results from these high-achieving companies will make The Service Profit Chain required reading for senior, division, and business unit managers in all service companies, as well as for students of service management.

W. Earl Sasser Jr.: author's other books


Who wrote The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

xa0 THE FREE PRESS A Division of Simon Schuster Inc 1230 Avenue of the - photo 1

xa0 THE FREE PRESS A Division of Simon Schuster Inc 1230 Avenue of the - photo 2

#xa0;

THE FREE PRESS
A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 1997 by James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, and Leonard A. Schlesinger

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

THE FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

14 15

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heskett, James L.

The service profit chain : how leading companies link profit and growth to loyalty, satisfaction, and value / James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr., Leonard A. Schlesinger.

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Customer services. 2. Customer satisfaction. 3. Employee loyalty. 4. Industrial productivity. I. Sasser, W. Earl. II. Schlesinger, Leonard A. III. Title.

HF5415.5.H47 1997

658.812dc21 96-44611

CIP

ISBN 0-684-83256-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-684-83256-2
eISBN: 978-1-439-10830-7

Dedication

To Marilyn, Connie, and Phyllisthe loves of our lives

Contents
Preface

Why are a select few service organizations better year in and year out at what they do than their competitors? This is a question that has prompted any number of how to do it books presenting keys to successful competition. Often based on anecdotal or case information of a sketchy nature, these books either leave unanswered a number of questions or room for a wide range of interpretations, actions, and judgments based on the theories espoused. (One outstanding exception to this statement is the work reported by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras in their book Built to Last.)

Several years ago, we decided to try to approach this question from another angle, the development and testing with quantifiable measures of a set of relationships that we have come to call the service profit chain. The chain represents a related set of strongly held convictions. The more we explored these convictions, the more we became convinced that they were not just ours, they were shared by managers leading some of the best-performing service organizations in the world. Some of them had fragments of data to support their convictions. No one had either the complete picture or all of the data in hand to support their views, but they clearly were managing by tenets similar to those in the service profit chain. In fact, we concluded that the chain was not our invention, but rather the assembled judgment of several dozen outstanding service managers and academic researchers with whom we have had the pleasure of interacting over the years.

The result of our efforts is a view, backed up with facts, of relationships that describe the achievement of success, measured ultimately in terms of growth and profitability, in a service organization. At the core of service profit chain management is the principle of managing by fact, an admonition heard more frequently than it has been practiced during the past decade of emphasis on continuous quality improvement.

This book presents both fact and anecdote. Without the latter, facts have little life. And some elements of the service profit chain cannot be explained by fact alone. Further, merely understanding the nature of the links in the chain does not dictate any one method for achieving high levels of performance in each. Thats where anecdotes can provide rich examples of the various ways that strong service profit chain performance can be attained, an important objective of this book.

In particular, our interest turned not just to behavior achieved through extraordinary effort of the kind difficult to duplicate, but, more importantly, to those mechanisms and behaviors that can be sustained over time. After all, organizations practicing things that truly separate them from their competitors do so one day at a time on the competitive frontline, not just through occasional brilliant strategies or insights from headquarters. The anecdotal evidence we have included is intended to convey both the extraordinary actions and accomplishments of the organizations we describe but also, as the chairman of one of the companies in our sample likes to put it, the importance of the mundane in these same organizations.

The service profit chain, like any good product or service, is an evolving set of ideas. We are constantly learning new things about it with each new set of data we obtain, although the data have long since conformed to a consistent pattern. This book reflects our most recent thinking, but it also is written to convey the sense that more work on this set of ideas is required, just as is true of any useful management concept.

Several colleagues have worked closely with us in the development and testing of these ideas. Fred Reichheld of Bain & Co. management consultants, working with one of us, developed the early thinking on the importance of customer loyalty. Jeff Zornitsky and Alan Grant of Exchange Partners, with the help of one of us, developed data showing the influence of frontline capability on employee satisfaction as well as differences between current and full potential performances. A number of our associates at the Harvard Business School have provided important inputs to our thinking. These include Gary Loveman, Jeffrey Rayport, and Roger Hallowell, members of the service management interest group, who have helped us hone a number of the ideas expressed here. Bob Kaplan has provided important stimulation with his work on what has come to be known as the balanced scorecard, a concept compatible with much of the service profit chain. The work of Mike Jensen, George Baker, and Karen Wruck has confirmed some of our thinking about pay-for-performance and other reward schemes. And Bob Simons, also of the HBS faculty, has stimulated us with his thinking about designing control systems with different degrees of latitude and limits. We have benefited as well from the contributions of our former colleagues Chris Hart, Christopher Lovelock, Tom Jones, and David Maister. And the support of Nancy Lund and Kathy Ivanciw at HBS was critical to the preparation of the book manuscript.

Perhaps most important of all, a number of organizations have cooperated more than we could have expected in supplying evidence that the service profit chain exists in practice. They include the Merry Maids subsidiary of The ServiceMaster Company, the Taco Bell division of Pepsico, Banc One, Southwest Airlines, American Express, Waste Management, USAA, MBNA, Intuit, British Airways, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, and the Fairfield Inn subsidiary of the Marriott Corporation. We are indebted to all of these people and organizations for helping to shape the thinking described here.

In a sense, then, this is an account of our investigational odyssey, one that has taken surprising turns. In the process, marketing ideas we have nurtured and taught for years have been turned upside-down, conceptions of what drives employee performance have changed, the real value of process assessment such as continuous quality improvement or reengineering has become apparent, and the role of leadership in all of this has become clearer.

James L. Heskett
W. Earl Sasser
Leonard A. Schlesinger

Boston, Massachusetts
December 1996

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value»

Look at similar books to The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.