Product Description
by Fiona Urquhart (Author)
This book explores the basic tenets of service excellence, opening to distinguish customer service from service excellence, and explore the driving aspects of strategy and philosophy.
The brand promise to customers creates expectations; hooks targeted and segmented customers into a relationship. Service operations deliver expectations, delight, or on occasion, disappointment, and marketing responds to create loyalty, further delight, or recover the relationship.
Freshness of product or service offering, the injection of a characterful sense of fun, and sensitive personalization of service combine to deliver an authentic, pleasurable and memorable service experience prompting much sought loyalty and advocacy. In turn, staff are happy, profits rise and the organization has long-term sustainability.
The first volume offers some theoretical background, while the second suggests mechanisms, tools, and techniques to help embed to excellence as the foundation of value that the organization delivers. Both contain practical examples and a self-assessment diagnostic tool to identify organizational areas of strength, and aspects to improve.
Author Biography
Fiona Urquhart, MBA, FCIM, FIC, after a retail grounding with the John Lewis Partnership, Fiona gained an MBA from CASS Business School. She leads Durham University's MBA module on service excellence, having previously taught for the Open University. She developed AC Nielsen's EPOS based research service, Scantrack, and a pilot EFTPOS service for retail clearing banks. Fiona provides consultancy to diverse service and manufacturing companies, and does charitable work. She supports service excellence projects and training at various corporates., making use of problem based learning to create practical learning situations and encourage reflective learning. She has delivered a series of interactive workshops for several European universities to research PBL in the context of entrepreneurial learning, and will present her findings at a number of global conferences.
