The Manager's Guide to Service Excellence: The Fine Art of Customer Service

Greg Turko is a policy analyst at the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and
Universities.

One irony of our frequently documented move—or, according to some,
fall—into a service economy is the deteriorating quality of most of
the service offered to an increasingly disgruntled public.

Petite, a Toronto-based management consultant with an impressive array
of corporate clients, teaches organizations how to improve their
service. This volume is essentially such a training seminar in book
form. She outlines a wide range of real-life service problems and
provides solutions using case studies supported by numerous anecdotes.
Most of the solutions revolve around the disarmingly simple, though
apparently very elusive, concept of finding out what clients want and
giving it to them. She also deals with many excuses individuals or
groups use to justify not providing good service.

Petite unquestionably has many good ideas that could be usefully
applied in most organizations that purport to serve the public. However,
some companies may see short-term cost as a greater issue than the book
indicates, and the relentlessly upbeat, can-do tone—a staple of many
management seminars—may not be to everyone’s taste. Also the
transition from seminar room to printed page appears to have come at the
expense of the personal impact, dynamism, and enthusiasm that Petite no
doubt brings to an in-person session. You had to be there, one suspects,
to get the full message.