Book SummaryExcellence Wins, by Horst Schulze

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Excellence Wins

In today's fiercely competitive marketplace, businesses that fail to deliver exceptional service are destined for irrelevance. According to hotel manager Horst Schulze in Excellence Wins, this is because exceptional service can earn you loyal customers for life—while lackluster service can drive away even your most diehard fans. To create a culture of exceptional service, Schulze offers a business philosophy and strategies that can help business leaders, entrepreneurs, and anyone else elevate their organization's standards.

Schulze is the former President and COO of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Under his leadership, The Ritz-Carlton became renowned...

Excellence Wins Summary Why Customer Service Is Important

According to Schulze, any business that wants to be successful must prioritize retaining its existing customers. Loyal customers are valuable—they’ll consistently choose your brand over your competitors and recommend it to their friends and family.

The key to retaining loyal customers is consistently providing them with a better experience than they can get anywhere else. Learn what they want most from your company, and make it your top priority to give them the best possible version of it.

Schulze notes that most businesses don’t focus enough on retaining loyal customers. Often, when companies become successful, they start skimping on product quality or service standards to reduce costs. Doing so spoils their core brand experience, causing them to lose their customers’ loyalty.

Even minor mistakes can drive away loyal customers, contends Schulze. Small oversights or lapses in cleanliness, professionalism, and attention to detail are enough to make customers question a company’s overall quality and trustworthiness. For example, if a worker at a restaurant fails to adequately clean the bathrooms,...

Excellence Wins Summary How to Provide Exceptional Customer Service

Now that we've covered why exceptional customer service is so crucial for business success, let's examine some specific tips that all employees can follow to deliver world-class service experiences.

Tip #1: Fulfill Basic Customer Desires

As we’ve discussed, building customer loyalty is all about going above and beyond to create the ideal customer experience. But how? According to Schulze, there are three things that all customers desire, and employees should focus on fulfilling these desires.

1) Customers want your product or service to be free of functional flaws; it should do everything they need it to do. For instance, if you run a massage parlor, your customers should feel completely relaxed and pain-free by the end of their massage.

2) Customers want to be served as quickly as possible. Slow service is enough to ruin a customer’s experience even if it’s otherwise positive.

3) Customers want to receive your product or service from someone who seems like they genuinely care about their feelings, argues Schulze. He stresses that this third factor—personal care—often matters most of all in creating customer loyalty. If your employees make the customer feel...

Excellence Wins Summary How to Build an Exceptional Organization

Going above and beyond in fulfilling customer desires is vital for any organization striving to provide exceptional service. But savvy leadership also plays a key role in steering the company in a positive direction. Here are some strategies managers and executives can use to build an organization fully committed to delighting customers.

Strategy #1: Motivate Your Team

Schulze believes that too many managers view their employees as reluctant workers who need to be pushed or coerced into action. Instead, he argues that leaders get better results if they inspire their employees to want to work hard and provide high-quality service.

It’s possible to motivate employees to achieve company goals because humans have an innate desire for purpose and meaningful relationships, according to Schulze. The opportunity to provide world-class service to customers is a chance for them to attain both of these desires: Employees feel like they’re accomplishing a worthy purpose by working at an elite level, and they build meaningful relationships by working together and serving customers.

(Shortform note: In _[The Leadership...

Shortform Exercise: Reflect on Your Experiences as a Customer

Recognize the importance of high-quality customer service by thinking back on a recent experience you’ve had with a business and judging how well it followed the principles outlined in Excellence Wins.

Describe a recent service experience you’ve had as a customer. This may have been at a restaurant, retail store, or other kind of service-based business. How well did the employees fulfill your three basic desires? That is, how functional was their product or service, how quickly were you served, and how much personal care did you feel?

Shortform Exercise: Improve Your Organization’s Culture

According to Schulze, organizations must establish a purpose-driven culture if they want their employees to do their best work. Reflect on what it would take to build such a culture at the organization you work for—whether you’re a manager or any other kind of worker.

Schulze contends that all organizations need a vision of how they want to serve others that employees believe is worth working for. What is your organization’s vision? If it doesn’t have one, imagine a more purposeful version of your organization and write down a vision for it. (For example, if you work at a nonprofit that connects kids with mentors, your vision could be to help as many children as possible reach their full potential in their career and personal lives through transformative mentor relationships.)