Customer Reviews

Service Breakthroughs: Changing the Rules of the Game

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This is one of the first books that discuss the client-side of businesses. When this book was published, very few authors had thought of addressing this topic, and Heskett, Sasser and Hart did an excellent job in their analysis of the service industries. The market for banks, hotels, airlines and other service providers has changed dramatically in the last ten years, and the authors show what the leaders in each of these markets did to keep their customers coming back. They show that the main goal of the corporation is to 'achieve goals for the customers', not only perform services day in and day out. I have read many other books on this same subject after this one, but none with such wit and brilliance.

Heskett and Sasser are from the Harvard Business School. Hart is the man with the practical experience. The book covers a lot of ground and there are numerous examples of how customer service oriented companies outperform competitors in similar indsutries that are more inward focused. Similar to Tom Peters "In search of Excellence" except that whereas more than half of companies chosen for their excellence by tom Peters are now gone, the companies showcased by heskett el al are still alive and kicking. There is a lot of empirical data and anectodal case studies from the airline, hotel and other industries. Start with this book and also buy "The Service Profit Chain" by the same writers to gain a complete understanding of how to design a competitive service process. These books are exec or MBA level. Nothing for the faint hearted. Don't let the age of the books fool you.Its all there, its all applicable, and better yet the solutions don't require dependence on high tech technology and can be implemented by small business as well as large. Jim Kayalar is a certified management consultant and has consulted with tourism development organizations, hotels and resorts. [...]

This is a pretty good book about how to innovate in service industries. The positive amazing thing is that this book was published over 20 years ago (1990 not 2008). The negative amazing thing is that we don't know much more today than we knew twenty years ago. This books is in the typical HBS style of doing a dozen case studies and then writing a book. These academic authors have done a good job in my opinion. If you don't like this style you can consider Service Innovation: How to Go from Customer Needs to Breakthrough Services, which is written by a consultant-practitioner. If you buy both books you will also notice how little progress we have done in this field during the last 20 years.

I bought this book thinking it was a current reference, based on the Amazon publishing date of 2008. It must be the date of re-issue, because the real copyright date is 1990!! So, although the principles may still be sound, the examples are over 20 years old -- not useful to me at all.

I bought this book from a second-hand japanese bookstore, I took it because it was about the only thing in English, and I'm happy I did. What I consider most interesting and more useful of this book is that it is a big "how-to". It'll tell you what outstanding companies have done, how it have worked, and why. It's just amazing to see the huge pile of ideas you can get from this book; it showed me that there are a lot of opportunities out there for the entrepreneur with the right ideas in mind.
The only thing I didn't like much about this book is that I've already used FIVE highlighters on it ;) (I told you, it's really good!)