Keeping the Edge: Giving Customers the Service They Demand (Paperback)

by Dick Schaaf (Author), Karl Albrecht (Foreword)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Service quality is reexamined by Schaaf in this sequel to his 1989 coauthored The Service Edge. The financial realities of the marketplace, the proliferation of technology and the maturing of our economy all dramatically affect business. But how do these factors specifically affect the delivery and management of service? Schaaf's answer is interesting and surprising: companies delivering good service focus not on tactical issues concerning specific customer interactions but on strategic issues integrating the fundamentals of the business. For example, service quality is more about systems and how they are managed than about people and how they act. Broad outlines of successful service strategies are concisely presented here and supported with anecdotal evidence. This book is highly recommended to corporate executives and business students who want to gain insight into the basic issues of quality service in a rapidly changing environment.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description
In 1989, Dick Schaaf, co-author of Service Edge, which profiled 101 leading organizations that were making service their #1 priority. Now, in Keeping the Edge, Schaaf revisits the surviving 99 companies, including American Express, Disney, and Home Depot, to see how they have fared.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Plume (March 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452271916
• ISBN-13: 978-0452271913
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,104,637 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Different (and very challenging) view of service excellence., May 15, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Keeping the Edge: 9Giving Customers the Service They Demand (Hardcover)

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.