I read this book for the Creative Good Fellows program, and despite Phil Terry's ravings about how good this book is, I was not really looking forward to it. Turns out I should have taken my kindergarten teacher's advice and not judged The Service Profit Chain to be yet another boring business book based on its generic cover.

The Service Profit Chain lays out a connection that is relevant to any service organization: a measurable set of relationships between profitibility, customer loyalty and satisfaction, and employee satisfaction, productivity, and loyalty. It's not as dry as I expected, either, as it uses real-world examples (which I generally find helpful) from studies conducted in organizations like Southwest Airlines, MBNA, British Airways, and Ritz-Carlton, among others.

The tactic The Service Profit Chain took was to identify the relationships between business drivers and profitibility. So, instead of agreeing that "market share" or "customer satisfaction" are important and focusing on getting more, it identifed which business drivers could actually be tied to profitibility--market share wasn't one of them--and provided examples on how those drivers could be positively impacted to make a company more profitable.

There are some take-aways that can be applied to the work I currently do, but they are really relevant at a higher level where more broadly-reaching decisions are made. In other words, it's not wholly relevant yet, but definitely goes into the "read again" pile.