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Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight
In this pioneering guide, two business authorities introduce the new discipline of Service Design and reveal why trying new strategies for pleasing customers isn’t enough to differentiate your business—it needs to be designed for service from the ground up.
Woo, Wow, and Win reveals the importance of designing your company around service, and offers clear, practical strategies based on the idea that the design of services is markedly different than manufacturing. Bestselling authors and business experts Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O’Connell contend that most companies, both digital and brick-and-mortar, B2B or B2C; are not designed for service—to provide an experience that matches a customer’s expectations with every interaction and serves the company’s needs. When customers have more choices than ever before, study after study reveals that it’s the experience that makes the difference. To provide great experiences that keep customers coming back, businesses must design their services with as much care as their products.
Service Design is proactive—it is about delivering on your promise to customers in accordance with your strategy, not about acceding to customer dictates. Woo, Wow, and Win teaches you how to create "Ahhh" moments when the customer makes a positive judgment, and to avoid Ow" moments—when you lose a sale or worse, customer trust.
Whether you’re giving a haircut, selling life insurance, or managing an office building, your customer is as much a part of your business as your employees are. Together, you and customers create a bank of trust; fueled by knowledge of each other’s skills and preferences. This is Customer Capital, the authors explain, and it is jointly owned. But it’s up to you to manage it profitably.
Innovative yet grounded in real world examples, Woo, Wow, and Win is the key strategy for winning customers—and keeping them.
Woo, Wow, and Win reveals the importance of designing your company around service, and offers clear, practical strategies based on the idea that the design of services is markedly different than manufacturing. Bestselling authors and business experts Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O’Connell contend that most companies, both digital and brick-and-mortar, B2B or B2C; are not designed for service—to provide an experience that matches a customer’s expectations with every interaction and serves the company’s needs. When customers have more choices than ever before, study after study reveals that it’s the experience that makes the difference. To provide great experiences that keep customers coming back, businesses must design their services with as much care as their products.
Service Design is proactive—it is about delivering on your promise to customers in accordance with your strategy, not about acceding to customer dictates. Woo, Wow, and Win teaches you how to create "Ahhh" moments when the customer makes a positive judgment, and to avoid Ow" moments—when you lose a sale or worse, customer trust.
Whether you’re giving a haircut, selling life insurance, or managing an office building, your customer is as much a part of your business as your employees are. Together, you and customers create a bank of trust; fueled by knowledge of each other’s skills and preferences. This is Customer Capital, the authors explain, and it is jointly owned. But it’s up to you to manage it profitably.
Innovative yet grounded in real world examples, Woo, Wow, and Win is the key strategy for winning customers—and keeping them.
341 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 29, 2016
45 people are currently reading
367 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 4, 2016
Tom and Patricia have written an interesting book on how to design excellent service offerings. I like the focus on service, since so many books focus on products and only think about service as an add-on or afterthought. Their four principles are very sound:
1. The customer is always right – if the customer is right for you
2. Don’t surprise and delight your customers – just delight them
3. Great service must not require heroic efforts
4. Great service must deliver coherent experience across all channels
And then a fifth, for good luck:
5. Continuous innovation.
Now you know what you need to do.
1. The customer is always right – if the customer is right for you
2. Don’t surprise and delight your customers – just delight them
3. Great service must not require heroic efforts
4. Great service must deliver coherent experience across all channels
And then a fifth, for good luck:
5. Continuous innovation.
Now you know what you need to do.
December 14, 2016
Overall, this was good.
Cons:
I didn't need to be convinced that service design was important, nor was I particularly interested in the history of the topic. That consumed more of the book than necessary for me.
There was a fair amount of "here's an idea, and here's a company that demonstrates that idea". That approach to making a point leaves me unsatisfied ... implies correlation between their success, their intent, and their service design. In practice, I think those things are often coincidence or follow very indirect routes.
I listened to the audible version, and the narrator felt like he was shouting.
Pros:
The service archetype section was amazing. I work in a professional services ("solution") company and when they described that world, it felt like they were reading my mind. I want to get a print copy to dig back through that section - there was gold there.
Many new concepts for me (though I'm admittedly newer to the service design idea). The idea of customer capital or the reality that a service co-creates with the customer were new perspectives to me and intriguing.
Cons:
I didn't need to be convinced that service design was important, nor was I particularly interested in the history of the topic. That consumed more of the book than necessary for me.
There was a fair amount of "here's an idea, and here's a company that demonstrates that idea". That approach to making a point leaves me unsatisfied ... implies correlation between their success, their intent, and their service design. In practice, I think those things are often coincidence or follow very indirect routes.
I listened to the audible version, and the narrator felt like he was shouting.
Pros:
The service archetype section was amazing. I work in a professional services ("solution") company and when they described that world, it felt like they were reading my mind. I want to get a print copy to dig back through that section - there was gold there.
Many new concepts for me (though I'm admittedly newer to the service design idea). The idea of customer capital or the reality that a service co-creates with the customer were new perspectives to me and intriguing.
August 4, 2017
Similar to the other review here, overall it was great. I picked up a copy from my local library.
I actually learned some new concepts but felt that the end of the book seemed a little like filler until the Appendix / service design tools part. That made it solid for me where there were workbook style exercises that I could run with. .
I did find the parts on Service archetype insightful, almost like reading a service horoscope.
This book is loaded with examples but I didn't need to be preached to about the benefit of Service Design, I am already heading that way with my career.
One small thing - I did notice that all of the theoretical examples had female pronouns. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not an anti-feminist though I do believe in equality. I know that some sentences could be rewritten to be gender neutral. I think it was great to have a few but the persistence of it somehow threw me. In our modern world (2017) where gender is a multitude of nouns, why not go gender neutral?
I actually learned some new concepts but felt that the end of the book seemed a little like filler until the Appendix / service design tools part. That made it solid for me where there were workbook style exercises that I could run with. .
I did find the parts on Service archetype insightful, almost like reading a service horoscope.
This book is loaded with examples but I didn't need to be preached to about the benefit of Service Design, I am already heading that way with my career.
One small thing - I did notice that all of the theoretical examples had female pronouns. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not an anti-feminist though I do believe in equality. I know that some sentences could be rewritten to be gender neutral. I think it was great to have a few but the persistence of it somehow threw me. In our modern world (2017) where gender is a multitude of nouns, why not go gender neutral?
January 21, 2017
Deserves 3.5 stars. I like Thomas Stewart, his books on intellectual capital are first-rate. This book was good, but not up to my expectations of him as a writer. There are some great points about service design, but I found the book a bit rambling.
July 23, 2018
Excellent book for contemporary Customer Experiences. Great at incorporating today's online engagement. I will read again. I am working to apply the design principles to a variety of Customer Interactions.
July 21, 2016
I wrote it :-)
April 23, 2017
Good book on customer experience.
Woo, wow and win is a good book for any organization that is looking to get started on their customer experience journey.
Woo, wow and win is a good book for any organization that is looking to get started on their customer experience journey.
November 22, 2020
Consistency By Design
Service design for consistency brings customer delight - and it doesn’t happened by chance. That’s the thin slice summation of this well written book. Easy to read and challenging to achieve, customer delight rests in a few tenets and most importantly consistent delivery of the service. Complete with checklists and actionable information, you won’t be disappointed.
Service design for consistency brings customer delight - and it doesn’t happened by chance. That’s the thin slice summation of this well written book. Easy to read and challenging to achieve, customer delight rests in a few tenets and most importantly consistent delivery of the service. Complete with checklists and actionable information, you won’t be disappointed.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews