Excellence Wins — A Top of the Page Review
July 2023
Here in Phoenix where I live summer seems to last forever. On a blistering hot afternoon, the fresh, shimmering water of a swimming pool is a welcoming sight. Excellence in customer service is the same way. It draws people’s attention.
I love how Excellence Wins reorients customer service. Most frameworks for improving customer service start with the customer and work backward to processes. Excellence Wins starts with the employee and ends with the customer, creating a continuous line of service that provides value at every touchpoint. The driving mantra, “Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen,” embodies excellent service, while simultaneously enticing customers and employees to take the plunge. Like a pool on a hot day, excellent customer service draws people in.
Schulze, Horst. 2019. Excellence Wins: A No-Nonsense Guide to Becoming the Best in a World of Compromise. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan
Quick Summary
Excellence Wins is a career retrospective by Horst Schulze, co-founder and former president of the Ritz-Carlton Hotels. Excellence, he argues, is demonstrated by anticipating and meeting customer needs, empowering employees and treating them with the same care shown to customers, and communicating consistently and clearly.
Anecdotes from his career are translated into broader applications that will resonate for most business leaders. He makes the case that three universals of customer service apply to all businesses.
Customers want:
- Products / services with no defects
- Timeliness
- Kindness
Customer service must be designed into the full customer experience. The author argues that if customer service is a synonym for complaint resolution, the business has missed the point. He identifies three steps for excellent customer service.
Step 1 — Great welcome. In the hospitality industry this is often a greeting at the front door. A great welcome may look different in other service sectors. In software where I spent part of my career, a great welcome corresponds to how easy it is to get and start using new software. In physical products, a great welcome might be an easy-to-open package. 😉
Step 2 — Complying with customer’s wishes. Give the customer what they want. See list above.
Step 3 — Saying good-bye. For the author, a key part of customer service is the simple effort of saying good-bye or thank you. I am always flabbergasted when organizations drop the ball in designing their good-bye processes, especially when they perceive that they are losing a customer. Poor customer service for those cancelling memberships or subscriptions is far too common. Companies that punish customers for leaving are missing the point; as Schulze says “The minute we start thinking and acting as if we own the customer, we are nurturing a dangerous fantasy.”
Key Takeaways
Leadership
Excellence Wins makes a great case for servant leadership. Leaders have the greatest responsibility for service. They create the conditions with enable or inhibit service internally and externally. A servant leader anticipants and meets his people’s needs. He trusts the people he selects and empowers those people to serve with excellence.
He makes clear that good leadership is about “conscious decision making.” Ultimately a leader’s responsibility is to select a destination, clearly and consistently point to that destination, to remove barriers that hinder achieving the destination, and to hold everyone accountable for achieving the destination.
He drives home the idea that “proper management involves caring for people.” He is clear that customer service is connected to employee experience. All employees serve customers (either from the front of the house or the back of the house), but they also serve each other. The end result is that customer service is practiced internally and externally. This people centered approach creates frictionless operations, decreases turn over, and mitigates risk from unhappy customers and employees.
Create an environment where people want to do a good job. Make it possible for them to do a good job. And then let them do a good job.
Process Design
Every touchpoint needs to align to the vision and mission of the organization. How work is done, how people are treated must further the mission. Culture and processes must go hand-in-hand. Both must drive to the vision and the mission or else the business will fail.
The author makes clear that the vision and mission must be more than lip service. The vision and mission must inform every aspect of the business.
Memorable Quotes
1️⃣
“Customer service isn’t just for those who face the public. It also extends to people inside an organization who deal with each other.”
2️⃣
“[T]o be the best of anything is not the same as being excellent. You can be better than all your competitors and still have a gap to deal with when it comes to achieving excellence…In the long run, excellence is what secures your future.”
3️⃣
“There is a difference between inspection and measurement. Inspection means you’re looking over someone’s shoulder, trying to catch them messing up. Measurement means taking samples to determine if you and the people you’ve chosen for your organization are fulfilling your overall vision — and if not, how to get closer to the goal in the future.”
4️⃣
“A company’s objectives are set for the good of all — the owners, the employees, the public. This positions us to make tough decisions when someone isn’t living up to the objectives and, after being dealt with, doesn’t mend their ways. We need not worry that we’re being ‘unloving’ by holding them to a high standard.”
5️⃣
“Each and every difficulty is an opportunity to advance the trust quotient or to squander it.”
Final Thoughts
Customer service as a synonym for complaint resolution is an antiquated concept. Successful business operations meet needs and provide value to every person in every interaction at every point in the business. For employees and customers alike because every business is a people business and serving customers starts with the ways we serve employees.
The book is a solid case study in how to integrate leadership excellence as well as both internal and external customer service into practical business operations.
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Thanks for reading! I am a self professed nerd who loves reading and learning. To me every book is a conversation. By the end of the conversation, I always have new ideas that I want to try. What are you reading?
