1. To Offer Great Services, Dare to Be Bad!!!
Excellence Is Being Great At The Things Yours
Customer Value Most
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Customer Value Foundation Helps To Measure Customer score (CVM) Score
Friends, we have been sending mailers to you on banking customer value
study (click to Open) on the lines of what we have done in Brazil. The study
answers essential questions that you might want to ask yourself
 What do my customers value most? What is important to them?
 How do I compare to my competitors? How do I perform better than them
and become more attractive to customers?
 What will it take to excel
 How else could I find excellence? What tasks do I conduct first?
Below article is by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, the authors of Uncommon Services. How to
Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business, published by Harvard Business Review
Press. You can read below article at FORBES website.
Service excellence can be a slippery concept. We know it when we see it, and
when we see it, we’re usually better off? But what exactly is great service?
In our work with service companies, we use a very specific definition:
Excellence is being great at the things your customers value most. If you’re
great at something that few of your customer care much about—see Saturday
delivery from the U.S. post office –it doesn’t count. In fact it is
counterproductive.
Because here’s the problem. Your capital and energy are limited resources, so
to afford to excel at the things that matter most, you have to under-invest

2. somewhere else. Our advice is simply to underperform rationally, in the area
your customer value least.
Take WalMart. WalMart customers want the lowest possible price on the things
they use every day. And WalMart delivers, with reliably rock-bottom pricing and
fantastic product variety. To afford it, the company under-delivers on other part
of the retail experience, such as sales support and ambience. You won’t find any
arm of helpful employee at your average WalMart, and its décor isn’t likely to
give you ideas for your home renovation. Yet WalMart customers are delighted
to make these tradeoffs.
This is the pattern among service leaders in every industry we have studied. It
turns out that winning service companies aren’t great at everything. They’re bad
at some things, but the pattern isn’t haphazard. It’s mapped tightly to their
customers’ priorities.
How do you pull this off in your own business? The key is to choose your
weaknesses carefully. Your goal is strategically bad service, bad service your
customers will tolerate, even wear as a badge of honor, as long as they get what
they want most in return. Many IKEA customers are proud of the fact that they
have to assemble their own stylish, affordable furniture.
What do my customers value most? Imagine you have a few of your best
customers in front of you. What do they care about? Which parts of the service
experience are important to them (low prices, quick response time, etc.)? Now
list those service attributes in order of importance, from their perspective. To
be sure you’re right, test the list with real, live customers. We guarantee you
that some part of that conversation will surprise you, and the
How do I compare to my competitors? Performance is a relative concept. Once
you’re confident about what your customers want, put your current service
offering in the context of your industry. See how you stack up compared with
the other key players, particularly on high-value dimensions. Does someone
else own excellence? Is there little difference between your service model and

3. everyone else’s? This type of mapping will lay out the options for any potential
strategic shifts.
What will it take to excel? Or, put differently, what would your customers be
willing to give up for the things they really want? For example, some health care
companies are betting that patients will trade access to a high-status physician
for immediate care from someone with fewer degrees (see CVS’s Minute
Clinics). What tradeoffs would your own customers make? Would they give up
cutting-edge technology to get a service rep on site faster? Table that R&D
initiative, and add slack to your service teams.
How else could I fund excellence? Tradeoffs in the service experience are one
way to create the resources for greatness, but you’ll likely need other strategies
as well. Charging extra is the simplest approach, but it’s not easy to pull off in a
tough economy. Consider others : running the back office more efficiently or
reducing costs in ways that also improve service. Progressive Insurance has
saved a bundle of money on fraud by sending high-service vans to the scene of
an accident, both to dust off customers and to make sure that the accident
actually happened. The customers they want, the ones who aren’t trying to
defraud them, love the experience. The vans more than pay for themselves.
These are the essential questions to ask in the design of any services model.
There are others, but we recommend starting here. If you can figure out how to
design and fund great service offering , the rest will seems easy.
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Customer Value Foundation to Know “WHY”
CUSTOMER VALUE FOUNDATION
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Email: narender.customervalue@customervaluefoundation.com;
Mahajan@customervaluefoundation.com

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