Uncommon Service

**Author:** Frances Frei

**Estimated Reading Time:** 42 minutes

**What You'll Learn:**

- Why being bad at some things is essential to being great at others - How to design service systems that work with average employees, not superstars - The four ways to fund service excellence without going broke - Why customers are your most underutilized resource - How culture multiplies the power of your service design - What it takes to scale excellence without losing it

**Who This Book Is For:**

Anyone who leads, manages, designs, or delivers service. Whether you run a multinational corporation, a small business, a nonprofit, a hospital ward, or a customer support team, the principles in this book will change how you think about what it means to serve people well.

Every business leader wants to deliver great service. Every organization claims to put customers first. Every mission statement promises exceptional experiences. And yet, walk into almost any business on any given day, and you will encounter service that is mediocre at best and infuriating at worst. Why is this so hard? The answer is not that leaders lack good intentions. It is not that employees are lazy or customers are unreasonable. The answer is that most organizations are trying to do something that is fundamentally impossible. They are trying to be good at everything. Think about what that means in practice. A bank wants to offer the highest interest rates, the lowest fees, the most convenient hours, the friendliest staff, the fastest transactions, and the most advanced technology. A hospital wants to provide the most thorough care, the shortest wait times, the lowest costs, the most compassionate staff, and the latest equipment. An airline wants to offer the cheapest fares, the most legroom, the best on-time performance, the most destinations, and the finest meals. These goals are not just ambitious. They are contradictory. Every resource you spend on one dimension of service is a resource you cannot spend on another. Every hour you keep your doors open costs money that could be returned to customers in other ways. Every feature you add creates complexity that makes excellence harder to achieve somewhere else. The organizations that deliver truly exceptional service have figured something out that most others have not. They have accepted a counterintuitive truth: to be great at the things that matter most to your customers, you must be deliberately bad at the things that matter less. This is the central insight of Frances Frei's work. As a professor at Harvard Business School who has spent decades studying service organizations, she has seen the same pattern repeat across industries. Companies that try to be everything to everyone end up being nothing special to…