Berry is a Distinguished Professor of Marketing and holds the M.B. Zale Chair in Retailing and Marketing Leadership in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. Berry's published books include Discovering the Soul of Service: The Nine Drivers of Sustainable Business Success, On Great Service, and Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations. He has twice been recognized with the highest honor Texas A&M bestows on a faculty member: Distinguished Achievement Award in Teaching and the Distinguished Achievement Award in Research. He is the recipient of the Career Contributions to Services Marketing Award from the American Marketing Association's Services Marketing Special Interest Group, the Outstanding Marketing Educator Award from the Academy of Marketing Science, and the Pinnacle Award as Marketing Educator of the Year from Sales and Marketing Executives International.
As Berry explains in the first chapter, his purpose is to “identify, describe, and illustrate the underlying drivers of sustainable success in service businesses. Creating a successful service operation is unquestionably a difficult task…The greater involvement of people in creating value for customers, the greater the challenge.” He examines 14 outstanding service companies (e.g. The Container Store, the Charles Schwab Corporation, Chick-fil-A, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, the St. Paul Saints AAA baseball franchise, and USAA) and suggests what lessons can be learned from them. Although quite different in terms of their size and nature, they demonstrate the same nine drivers of success, to each of which Berry devotes a separate chapter.
There are few (if any) head-snapping revelations in this book, nor does Berry claim to offer any. Rather, he focuses on basics and explains how the exemplary service to which the companies are wholly committed creates for each of them a significant, perhaps decisive, competitive advantage. The core strategies seem obvious: focus on serving a specific market need rather than on marketing a specific product for that need, focus on serving underserved market needs, and focus on serving the chosen markets with exceptional excellence. When stressing the importance of “trust-based” relationships, Berry includes everyone involved in the given enterprise, hence the importance of what he characterizes as “humane organizational values”. He correctly insists that such values depend on values-driven leadership which must permeate the organization, at all levels and in all areas of operation. Stable leadership stabilizes values and propels all other success sustainers.
With regard to the title of this book, consider this brief excerpt from the concluding chapter: “Great service companies have a soul that underlies their strategies and day-to-day operations. The company’s soul–its value system–is its foundational center, its inner core.” Berry fully understands how difficult it is to achieve and then sustain a great service company while noting that such companies are “humane communities that humanely serve customers and the broader communities in which they live.” Companies which now encounter great difficulty when attempting to attract and then retain the talented, skilled, and principled people they need would be well-advised to consider very carefully the meaning and significance of Berry’s concluding observation.
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