Dasu and Chase's book, The Customer Service Solution, provides an insightful perspective on designing and delivering service offerings. They have effectively synthesized the customer response perspectives from service marketing with process management perspectives taken by operational managers. The result is a better depiction of service management that can direct managers as well as prompt new directions for academic research.
A stated goal of the book (page 4) is to take principles coming from customer behavior research, which are often presented in the abstract, and show “how firms can apply them systematically to the design and management of service processes.” There are numerous trade books that enumerate factors of “service excellence” relating to making sure that employees are motivated and customers are happy, but those trade books provide little direction about how you design psychological factors into a service process. The Dasu and Chase book fills that gap.
This integration of psychological factors into service operations contexts is useful. This helps answer important service design issues such as how and when to allocate process control between employees and customers, how to configure the emotional aspects of service delivery, how to interrelate trust and control to emotional response, and so forth.
The book begins by clarifying the role of psychology in effective service delivery. The authors introduce a model built on six factors that shape customer perceptions: emotions, trust, control (and choice), sequence, duration, and attribution. These principles were previously discussed in the authors' 2001 Harvard Business Review article and 2010 Sloan Management Review article (I recommend both articles, and require my MBA students to study the 2010 article.). The book provides details and examples not available in the articles.
On the topic of emotions, the book emphasizes that so-called customer satisfaction does not drive loyalty, but it is emotional responses that drive loyalty. Although the concept of emotional response has been well-studied (especially in consumer behavior literature), Dasu and Chase operationalize the concept by mapping it into stages of a service process in what they call an “emotionprint.”
Likewise, the authors explain how the concept of trust is managed through an entire service process, including pre-engagement, service engagement, and repeat encounters. They emphasize the importance of operational excellence and quality management in trust building. They discuss error elimination tools such as poka-yokes that can help service providers “do it right the first time,” which is a much more sustainable approach than common platitudes such as “do whatever it takes to satisfy the customer.”
The discussion of process control is insightful. The authors reference literature that shows tension between firms, their employees, and their customers, in terms of who controls the service process. They provide guidance about how to achieve appropriate balance in process control at different stages of service delivery, so that the control needs of various parties can simultaneously be met.
They continue with the process design perspective in discussing issues pertaining to task sequencing, duration, and attribution. These concepts have been studied and published by other authors, and Dasu and Chase provide a good summary. Chapter 6 discussion on duration management is probably the best outline of the psychology of waiting since David Maister's seminal work in 1985 (which surprisingly was not referenced).
Perhaps the strongest application of psychology to service design is in the chapter (7) on attribution. There, the authors show how psychology concepts such as counterfactual reasoning and memory distortion can be used to improve customer perceptions of service delivery. The final chapter (8) summarizes the concepts from the book and provides a straightforward “how to” for using the books' ideas. It identifies questions that can be asked and phases that would be included in a service process improvement project.
The one weak spot of this book is the title. The Customer Service Solution sounds too much like the myriad of other books out there espousing secrets of service excellence, often full of anecdotes and platitudes but with little substance. The Dasu and Chase book is superior because it is grounded in the sciences of psychology and service operations management, and written in a way that is approachable by the common manager.
