Customers increasingly demand value from the services they use and expect their changing needs will be met. In Service Design for Business, Ben Reason, Lavrans Løvlie, and Melvin Brand Flu take an outside-in view of the customer lifecycle to determine the most effective means of meeting customer expectations while fulfilling business goals. They look at identifying and addressing customer pain points as well as how to guide users effectively through the service experience. The book provides a blueprint for creating responsive, agile, and customer-centric service structures that attract and retain customers from before engagement with the service to after the contract is fulfilled.
What passes for good service is often simply ordinary service, with each customer treated exactly the same as the previous one. Customers receive little acknowledgement or appreciation as workers perform their tasks and move on to the next person in line. According to Steve Curtin in Delight Your Customers, this happens because organizations and their employees emphasize the mundane job functions of service work when they should instead be focusing on the true essence of the job: giving customers the best experience possible. By focusing on job essence, enterprises can empower employees to elevate overall customer service skills.
