Achieving Breakthrough Service:
Leveraging Employee and Customer Satisfaction for Profit and Growth

Many of today's most successful and innovative companies know that "merely good" customer service is not good enough. In their ongoing efforts to remain competitive, they have abandoned the existing service model—with its built-in cycle of failure that punishes customers, employees, and shareholders—because it no longer works. Instead, all these organizations—large and small, public and private, and for-profit and not-for-profit—have embraced a more effective model created by our faculty through the analysis of breakthrough service firms.
At the heart of these endeavors is a strong belief that today's employee satisfaction, loyalty, and commitment influence tomorrow's customer satisfaction, loyalty, and commitment—and, ultimately, the organization's profit and growth. This practical management belief is reinforced by a growing body of empirical research into the "links" comprising what the authors term the "value profit chain".
Achieving Breakthrough Service is an intensive Executive Education program that focuses on the value profit chain model, and how that chain redefines service throughout all areas of an organization. The course shows participants how to leverage this new model to seize opportunities that are unattainable with the existing model—and how to reap the impressive payoffs of greater employee loyalty, greater customer loyalty, increased profitability, and faster growth for their organizations.

Program Objectives
Achieving Breakthrough Service is specifically designed to prepare senior executives to outdistance merely good competitors and propel their service to breakthrough levels. By leveraging the breakthrough service model, managers learn to target investments in order to develop employee and customer satisfaction levels for maximum competitive impact.

On the customer side, the model helps companies to:
• Retain current customers and establish a loyal customer base;
• Build business through the sale of related products and services to existing customers;
• Win new business through ongoing referrals from satisfied customers; and
• Enhance the research and development process for new products and services by gaining a better understanding of customer needs and wants.

On the employee side, the model helps companies to:
• Value investments in people as much as or more than investments in tangible assets;
• Use technology to support front-line workers, not just monitor them;
• Make hiring and training as important for front-line employees as for executives; and
• Link employee rewards to employee performance at every level.

Most important, the program affords participants the opportunity to craft a customized strategy for their own businesses. They return to their professional roles with a strategic vision of the service mission, as well as with the tools and skills to implement breakthrough service throughout their organizations.

Curriculum
Achieving Breakthrough Service draws upon a series of cases, videos, simulations, and articles recently developed and/or written by HBS faculty. Combining timely research, collective experience, and business philosophy with actionable ideas, the program's comprehensive curriculum examines seven key topical areas.

Together with the faculty team and other senior-level decision makers, participants study organizations that are successful at implementing the value profit chain to deliver differentiated products and services, while achieving the lowest cost. Specifically, they explore practical methods that are used to:

• Align elements of the "performance trinity"—management and leadership, culture and values, and strategy and vision;
• Treat employees like customers, and customers like employees;
• Practice effective methods of value exchange that are designed to enhance the value equation for employees, customers, partners, and investors;
• Identify and revisit shared values at the heart of an organization's culture;
• Develop value-centered means of performance measurement and recognition;
• Hardwire organizations to deliver promised results;
• Lead learning and innovation through effective knowledge transfer; and
• Achieve superior franchises that help ensure an organization's long-term status as the preferred employer, seller, buyer, neighbor, or place to invest.

In doing so, participants discuss ways to assess the lifetime value of antagonists, hostages, mercenaries, loyalists, and apostles/owners in an organization's portfolio of customers. They also examine the increasingly important concept of employee relationship management based on value calculations of employee loyalty. And, they explore ways to develop relationships with employees and customers that begin with satisfaction and lead to loyalty, commitment, apostle-like behavior, and, ultimately, ownership.

OPTIONAL APPLICATION SESSION
To further prepare teams to achieve the desired payoffs in the context of real work situations, an optional session is offered at the close of the program. With experienced coaching by the faculty, participants practice applying the value profit chain model to redefine service and maximize new opportunities within their own organizations.

ACTION-LEARNING TAKEAWAY
Every participant will receive the Achieving Breakthrough Value CD-ROM Series, a new program developed by the faculty. Achieving Breakthrough Value is a set of concepts that helps senior executives understand how to drive greater profitability by focusing on employee satisfaction and loyalty, which in turn leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty, and ultimately to increased value for shareholders. The program consists of four modules: "Understanding the Value Profit Chain," "Launching Transformation Using Value Profit Chain Principles," "Putting the Value Profit Chain to Work," and "Sustaining the Gains." Each module is on a separate CD, and contains classroom videos, video cases, animated frameworks, slides, and workbook exercises to reinforce individualized learning. Each CD brings key concepts to life, using best-practice examples from well-known organizations.

Participant Mix
A thoughtful admissions process ensures selection of highly qualified participants representing diverse companies, industries, and countries in order to enhance learning through exposure to vastly different perspectives and experiences.
Achieving Breakthrough Service is intended for a select group of senior managers in service, retail, and manufacturing firms who assume decision-making roles. Typical participants include, but are not limited to, general managers and executives responsible for service-related functions such as:
• Marketing;
• Human resource management;
• Operations; and
• Quality assurance activities;

Date
January 23 - 28, 2005 (Participants encouraged to arrive by January 19, 2004)

Location - Boston Massachusetts (Residential)

Fee - click here

Participants’ Comments
When my company merged two separate service organizations, we needed a framework for creating a new, more effective service experience. The program not only gave us tools for bringing together two very different service cultures, but also helped us to set priorities and develop a new decision-making process. It presented a totally different way of looking at the service that we're delivering, and at how we can take it to the next level."
Linda Kerr [Managing Director], SEI Investments Inc., U.S.

"I've had access to a lot of executive training during the course of my career, but this was the most valuable program I've ever attended. Between the quality of the faculty and participants, and the opportunity to debate ideas through the case method, it was an amazing experience. I wish all my peers could have been there with me."
Marc Giroux [Regional Vice President], TELUS Corporation, Canada