About the Book

Woo, Wow, and Win reveals the importance of service design for your company and offers executives in services businesses clear, practical strategies for designing and delivering great customer experiences, from beginning to end—the kind of experiences that build loyalty and lasting relationships. The connection between company and customer is very different in services—which represent 80% of the economy—than it is when customers are buying a product. In these businesses, customers aren’t waiting at the loading dock for a product to be delivered; they’re part of the process. When you are selling a service, you need to design an experience to share with your customer.

Woo, Wow, and Win identifies five essential principles to shape service design initiatives and bring coherence to your service strategy:

1. The customer is always right—provided the customer is right for you.

You have to decide which customers you want and which you do not. Deciding which customers you engage with and what you are willing to do for them is a powerful exercise in defining your brand—as is deciding which customers are wrong for you and which services you will not offer.

2. Don’t surprise and delight your customers—just delight them.

You delight your customers by meeting their needs within the expectations they have for whatever you are offering, whether those expectations are high or low. Why should they come to you? Why should they stay or return?

3. Great service must not require heroic efforts on the part of the provider or the customer.

Employees should not need to be superheroes, bend the rules, or take shortcuts to give customers a great experience. And saving time and money for customers—being easy to do business with—is just as important.

4. Service design must deliver a coherent experience across all channels and touchpoints.

Any place you choose to play, you have to play well. And anything you are going to do, you have to do well in every way. A corollary to this principle is that partners that provide complementary services are as much a part of the service value chain as your own touchpoints, platforms, and channels. 

5. You’re never done: Anticipate, create, innovate, iterate—and repeat as needed.

For service companies, innovation needs to become a firm-wide capability. You’ll be designing change at every stage of the customer journey, and, in many cases, reinventing not just your offerings but the activities of your employees.