Keeping the Edge: 9giving Customers the Service They Demand

For businesspeople paying lip service to the "exceed expectations" and "thrill/wow/dazzle/delight" recipes for outstanding service, this will be a troubling read. First, Schaaf dismisses such ideas as "hot air." Then he builds a persuasive case around the idea that service is less a matter of the tactical things people do and more a matter of the strategic tradeoffs a business has to make in serving both the needs of the customer and the need to turn a profit. What sets the book apart is its basis in real-world examples drawn from the same 101 companies Schaaf and Ron Zemke profiled and analyzed in the late '80s in "The Service Edge." Rather than create a new metaphor backed by a lot of aimless theory, Schaaf traces the practical things companies in his database have been doing in five basic areas: customer knowledge; balancing points of access (how and where they sell their goods and services) against market capacity; low-price against value-added strategies; providing service through people against the technology that increasingly replaces their efforts; and a provocative new idea he calls "customer empowerment." The key piece is knowledge. If you don't know much about what your customer expects, he argues, it's easy to say you'll exceed expectations. In reality, once you know what your customers expect, you'll generally find you have to work like mad just to "meet" expectations. But without that in-depth knowledge, you have no way to devise workable strategies that will bring customers back again. If you're comfortable with your basic assumptions about what customers will take for their dollar, you either won't like "Keeping the Edge" -- or you'll substantially change the way you approach the business of building an edge based on their satisfaction and loyalty.