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| Professor Frances Frei, emphasizing a point (photo courtesy of Harvard Business School (HBS) |
Professor Frances Frei is an engaging speaker who uses humor and live business experience to emphasize her points. Her book Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business provides valuable and practical insights on how organizations can build, improve and deliver reliable service excellence.
A Professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School and the Chair of the MBA Required Curriculum, she has received the HBS Student Association Faculty Award for teaching excellence on multiple occasions, as well as teaching awards from the Wharton School of Business and the University of Rochester.
Professor Frei serves on the Board of Directors and Board of Advisors of several private companies.
Uncommon Service
Her lecture revolved around the core aspects of her book and is anchored on what she referred to as the four truths of service excellence. These are:
Truth 1: You can't be good at everything
- To be good at something, you must be bad at something
- Know what your customers value most, in order to identify attributes that you need to be good at and attributes that you can be bad at
- Identify what can you do to reduce cost and improve service
- Make pricing more palatable to your customer
- Set up your processes and systems to make your people excel in providing quality service
- Provide the requisite skills and motivation to make sure that they succeed
- Influence customers in order for them to enhance their experience
The beauty in Professor Frie's presentation is that she uses paradox to effectively bring home her point. What I have shared are the key points of her presentation.
I would recommend her book Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business for those who want to dig deeper and who would want to know more about customer service excellence. Her book contains relevant examples of how companies have built stronger businesses by practicing these principles.
