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Curriculum Overview
The commitment to serve isn’t a commitment to try harder. It’s a commitment to create an environment where excellence is the only possible outcome.
Our Commitment to Serve curriculum fosters this environment by helping organizations to design and scale business models that reliably deliver a premium customer experience. It gives participants tools and skills to systematically compete on excellence, while exploring the design principles that drive performance. The content emphasizes creating a system where:
- Excellence is rigorously defined
- Average employees deliver exceptional value
- Customers value producing the excellence they consume
- Premium service is explicitly – and often creatively -- funded
The curriculum’s structure typically includes a high-energy, interactive lecture on the best thinking in management scholarship, collaborative analysis of key opportunities inside and outside the organization, design of an immediate action agenda, and targeted case discussions to stimulate creative problem-solving.
Sample seminar structure
Audience: 100 top managers at a leading media company that is trying to solve widespread customer service problems
Time: One day
Session 1. Priming Excellence: Service Management Case and Discussion (90 minutes)
The purpose of the opening session is to set a tone of rigorous, creative engagement and to begin exploring the true drivers of sustainable service advantage. After reviewing the case materials prior to the seminar’s start, participants examine the competitive landscape and atypical response of a service organization different from their own, yet familiar in its challenges and goals.
Cases are sourced from a range of industries, including technology, financial services, government, healthcare and retail. The discussion permits energetic exploration of ideas unburdened by the specifics of participants’ own business, which will be addressed in detail during the latter half of the day. The discussion also grounds the curriculum’s guiding ideas in a shared example that is revisited throughout the day.
Case Example: Commerce Bank
Commerce Bank became one of the fastest growing banks in the country by defying conventional wisdom about what retail banks must do to grow. Commerce differentiated the bank by offering a unique banking experience that emphasizes friendly, responsive, high-level service. The case explores the highly refined service model that guided the design of its operations and considers the tradeoffs involved in competing on service.
Learning points: Service can be a competitive differentiator and enabler of growth, but it must be designed systematically.
Questions to guide participants’ preparation:
- Analyze Commerce Bank’s service delivery system. How well does the company’s operations design support its competitive position? Which decisions in particular do you find critical to the bank’s success?
- How would you advise large incumbent’s to respond to Commerce Bank entering key markets?
- How is your own service offering differentiated from the competition? What is preventing your company from delivering reliable excellence?
Session 2. Storming the Ivory Tower: Service Scholarship Lecture (90 Minutes)
This high-energy, interactive lecture and discussion offers participants a customized review of the best thinking in services management.
Example: Designing Service Excellence
Firms that try to achieve service excellence by relying on great performers or inspiring their employees to “care more” about customers rarely succeed – in fact, these efforts often undermine an organization’s ability to drive consistent, superior performance over time. Truly sustainable service excellence must be designed systematically. Design principles include ensuring an adequate return on service investments, creating a system where average employees can deliver exceptional service, and managing and training
customers. This last principle is particularly important in service environments where customer behavior is impacting the cost and quality of service.
Session 3. Solutions Blueprint Workshop (120 Minutes)
This all-hands workshop is designed to analyze and improve a client’s current and potential service offerings. Building on the ideas developed in previous sessions, the tools and models used here identify the particular aspects of service a business should optimize, while investigating the design implications for its entire service model. The issue of tradeoffs is typically central in these choices, as it is rare that a company competes in an industry where it can afford to be good at everything. As part of this
workshop, we analyze how a client’s core strengths can be leveraged as well as which service gaps in the competitive landscape are most compelling.
Session 4. Action Agenda (90 Minutes)
A final formal session solidifies the learning from the day and creates a specific plan of action for how to develop a service model that will thrive in a client’s particular competitive landscape. Special attention is paid to surfacing and addressing likely barriers to implementation.
Session 5. Individual Feedback (optional)
Participants reveal a tremendous amount of information about themselves – and their organizations – in a training environment where new ways of learning, collaboration and communication are required. This optional session provides a space for interested individuals to engage the Concire team about their observations and explore opportunities on a personal and team level.
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