16 March 2011 201 words, 1 min. read

The service-profit chain at work

By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab PhD in marketing, director of IntoTheMinds
I recently read a post by Bruce Temkin on his blog who was emphasizing the importance of employees in the customer satisfaction process. The link between employees satisfaction and customer satisfaction were first made popular by Heskett et al. in […]

I recently read a post by Bruce Temkin on his blog who was emphasizing the importance of employees in the customer satisfaction process.
The link between employees satisfaction and customer satisfaction were first made popular by Heskett et al. in 1994 in the Harvard Business Review. I’ve attached the original diagram by Heskett et al. which is a pretty complete view of all the relationships. This being said I’d like to stress here that, although important, transactional relationships also occur (more than often actually) and employees are unfortunately of little help in this context.

The purpose of this post is not to elaborate on the service-profit chain (I prefer to refer to the literature) but rather to shed light on the original and pioneer work by Heskett et al. which, as you can see, has inspired marketeers for about two decades now.

My take:

During my research I came several times across pioneer works which were first published in non-academic journals (I can’t say that HBR is a professional journal). Another example that comes directly to my mind is the paper by Normann and Ramirez (1993) entitled “from value chain to value constellations” which 20 years ago already foresaw today’s era of collaborative work.



Posted in Strategy.