Publications

09 Jun 2003
Research & Ideas

Incentives and Operational Excellence

hospital association buying groups. For their part, the buying groups try to get as many products and services as they can for whatever fee they've agreed to pay in the contract. Owens & Minor decided to offer its View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

28 Feb 2022
Research & Ideas

How Racial Bias Taints Customer Service: Evidence from 6,000 Hotels

Hotels, restaurants, and other businesses in the service industry often thrive or die depending on whether they provide exemplary customer service, but new research shows that the color of a customer’s skin... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

Article

Are Self-service Customers Satisfied or Stuck?

By: Ryan W. Buell, Dennis Campbell and Frances X. Frei

This paper investigates the impact of self-service technology (SST) usage on customer satisfaction and retention. Specifically, we disentangle the distinct effects of satisfaction and switching costs as drivers of retention among self-service customers. Our empirical... View Details

Keywords: Service Delivery; Information Technology; Customer Satisfaction; Competition; Cost; Banks and Banking; Behavior; Market Transactions; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques

Find at Harvard

August 1995 (Revised October 1996)
Case

IDS Financial Services (Condensed)

By: John A. Deighton

Highlights the decision that must be made on balancing customer acquisition and retention and de-emphasizing the structural issues involved in administering the independent contractor sales force. View Details

Keywords: Customers; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decisions; Corporate Governance; Salesforce Management; Financial Services Industry

February 1994
Case

Xerox Corp.: The Customer Satisfaction Program (A)

A rewritten version of an earlier case, Xerox Corp.: The Customer Satisfaction Program. Does not provide an update and no new content is added. The new (A) and (B) case structure merely isolates the service guarantee issue. View Details

Keywords: Machinery and Machining; Customer Satisfaction

September 2016
Case

Financial Services at Falabella (A)

By: C. Fritz Foley and Agustin M. Hurtado

In 2010, the board and senior management team of Falabella, a leading retailer with operations throughout Latin America, faced choices about what to do with its financial services division. More than 4.5 million customers had CMR credit cards that could be used in... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Credit; Financial Institutions; Personal Finance; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Banking Industry; Retail Industry; Latin America; Chile; Argentina; Colombia; Peru

Article

Market Heterogeneity and Local Capacity Decisions in Services

By: Dennis Campbell and Frances X. Frei

We empirically document factors that influence how local operating managers use discretion to balance the tradeoff between service capacity costs and customer sensitivity to service time. Our findings, using data from one of the largest financial services providers in... View Details

Keywords: Customer Satisfaction; Cost; Standards; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Performance Capacity; Performance Productivity; Financial Services Industry; United States

Find at Harvard

17 Jun 2015
Lessons from the Classroom

Excellence Comes From Saying No

School Professor Frances Frei has explored that question for years in the retail realm, culminating in her 2012 book, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business. This past semester at HBS, the UPS... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

25 Jul 2005
Research & Ideas

An Organization Your Customers Understand

customer but every entity that interacts with you in a significant manner."3 This claim is repeated in the book The Customer Is CEO, which defines a customer as "the... View Details

Keywords: by Robert Simons

June 2004 (Revised July 2005)
Case

Procter & Gamble: Global Business Services

By: Thomas J. DeLong, Warren Brackin, Alex Cabanas, Phil Shellhammer and David L. Ager

Dave Walker, vice-president of business service opportunities and chairman of the governance team at Procter & Gamble, must decide what to do with P&G's 5,700 employee Global Business Services (GBS) group. GBS brought together internal services such as finance,... View Details

Keywords: Business Units; Change Management; Decision Making; Globalized Firms and Management; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Organizational Design

February 2024
Case

SundaySky: Changing Customer Experiences through Personalized Video

By: David C. Edelman and James Barnett

In June 2023, SundaySky CEO Jim Dicso considers growth strategies. The software-as-a-service company provided software to create advertising videos, customer service videos, and other videos, like employee training modules, and had begun to pilot a new generative... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Strategy; Technology Adoption; AI and Machine Learning; Applications and Software; Growth and Development Strategy; Advertising Industry; Technology Industry; United States

spring 1991
Article

Breaking the Cycle of Failure in Services

By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and James Heskett

Most managers recognize that good service is a direct result of having effective, productive people in customer contact positions. However, most service companies perpetuate a cycle of failure by tolerating high turnover and expecting employee dissatisfaction. This... View Details

Keywords: Goals and Objectives; Service Delivery; Success; Failure; Management Skills; Service Industry

Find at Harvard

June 2017 (Revised January 2019)
Case

Signet Jewelers: Assessing Customer Financing Risk

By: Gerardo Pérez Cavazos, Suraj Srinivasan and Monica Baraldi

Marc Cohodes, a renowned short seller, has identified weaknesses in Signet's business strategy, which he argues is heavily reliant on providing loans to customers with subprime credit scores. He believes that the company accounts for its receivables portfolio using... View Details

Keywords: Short Selling; Bad Debt Expense; Accounting; Financial Reporting; Financial Statements; Finance; Financing and Loans; Valuation; Financial Services Industry; Financial Services Industry; United States

08 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

A Balanced Scorecard Approach To Measure Customer Profitability

When the customer says "jump," they ask "how high?" They offer additional product features and services to their customers, but fail to receive prices that cover the costs for these... View Details

Keywords: by Robert S. Kaplan

16 Nov 2016
Research & Ideas

Turning One Thousand Customers into One Million

worked Going from zero customers to 1,000 customers can be a slow process for platforms because of the need to acquire both providers and customers of products and View Details

Keywords: by Thales S. Teixeira and Michael Blanding; Retail; Transportation; Accommodations

20 Dec 2017
Lessons from the Classroom

How to Design a Better Customer Experience

Click HereHarvard Business School Professor Stefan Thomke describes how his Executive Education students use LEGO blocks to design customer experiences. (Video by Executive Education) Why do some product or View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Health; Entertainment & Recreation

May 1994
Background Note

Segmenting Customers in Mature Industrial Markets: An Application

By: V. Kasturi Rangan

In mature industrial markets, segmenting customers by size, industry, or product benefits alone rarely is sufficient. Customer behavior regarding trade-offs between price and service also becomes an important criterion. This note offers a framework to enable such... View Details

Keywords: Segmentation; Framework; Consumer Behavior; Marketing Strategy; Industrial Products Industry

May 2016 (Revised January 2018)
Case

Airbnb, Etsy, Uber: Acquiring the First Thousand Customers

By: Thales S. Teixeira and Morgan Brown

By 2016, two-sided online platforms (or marketplaces) were pervasive among the highest growing internet startups around. These marketplaces sought to match suppliers of assets for rent, physical products or services with customers demanding them. Among the most notable... View Details

Keywords: Airbnb; Etsy; Uber; Growth Hacking; Two-sided Market; Internet and the Web; Marketing Strategy; Digital Platforms; Digital Marketing; Business Startups; Transportation Industry; Accommodations Industry

December 2005 (Revised October 2006)
Case

Pharmacy Service Improvement at CVS (A)

CVS's retail pharmacy operations are functioning poorly and dissatisfying customers. Many customers are defecting as a result. A pharmacy service improvement team has documented the current prescription fulfillment process, its exception rates, and the problems... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Performance Improvement; Business Processes; Retail Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States