Editorial Review:
What Do Citicorp, UPS and Marriott have in common? They are "breakthrough" service providers, firms that changed the rules of the game in their respective industries by consistently meeting or exceeding customer needs and expectations. To find out how these companies do it, service management experts James Heskett, Earl Sasser, and Christopher Hart put the question to the chief executive officers of fifteen of America's leading service firms attending a workshop at the Harvard Business School. Breakthrough leaders, they discovered, think very differently about their businesses than do their competitors, in distinct and well-defined ways. Now, in Service Breakthroughs, based upon five years of exhaustive research in fourteen service industries, Heskett, Sasser, and Hart show exactly what enables one or two companies in each industry to constantly set new standards for quality and value that force competitors to adapt or fail. At the heart of breakthrough performance, the authors contend, is a sometimes intuitive but thorough understanding of the "self-reinforcing service cycle" that replaces traditional management of "trade-offs." The "cycle" is a paradigm derived from the research results suggesting direct links between heightened customer satisfaction, increased customer retention, augmented sales and profit, improved quality and productivity, greater service value per unit of cost, improved satisfaction of service providers, increased employee retention, and further heightened customer satisfaction. With detailed examples and dramatic case studies of Mark Twain Bancshares, American Airlines, Florida Power & Light, Federal Express, McDonald's and many other companies, Heskett, Sasser, and Hart show how this self-reinforcing cycle of behavior differentiates breakthrough leaders from their "merely good" competitors. The authors describe how breakthrough managers develop counterintuitive, even contrarian, strategic service visions. These companies define their "service concept" in terms of results achieved for customers rather than services performed. They target market segments by focusing on psychographics -- how customers think and behave -- instead of demographics. And instead of viewing a service delivery system as a facility where the service is producted and sold, breakthrough firms see it as an opportunity to enhance the quality of the service. These profound differences in thought and action have brought spectacular results. For managers who wish to set the pace in their service industries, Service Breakthroughs will be essential reading.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Good book  2008-03-06
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. [...]
Great, hands-on book  2005-08-19
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!)
A very thorough view on sevice excellency 2000-04-04
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.
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