'But Wait, You Promised ...'

Dan Leemon, 47, chief strategy officer for Charles Schwab, understands this dilemma clearly. Charles Schwab is a brokerage firm, of course. It keeps money for people, has custody of stock certificates, and functions as a bank in many ways. But like Sprint PCs or directory assistance, Schwab is really a pure customer-service organization. Its specialty is financial-services customer service -- but it's service all the same. Everything else is record keeping.

"A lot of companies fall into the trap," says Leemon, "of believing that some new customer-service technology will take cost and management burden away and will eliminate the need to have very talented people on the phones and in their retail outlets.

"That has actually never been true," he says. Indeed, the complex demands of customers have increased the length of the typical call to Schwab by 75% during the past five years.

One old-economy sector that is justifiably famous for service is the cruise industry. The high-end cruise lines achieve this by offering training, incentives, and quality facilities. One thing that they do particularly well is suck up customer feedback.

Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCCL), for instance, has 22 ships. When a ship docks at home port at 7 AM, before it clears customs, someone from RCCL has boarded to retrieve the customer-comment cards distributed to every cabin. The ratings are tabulated, the written comments are transcribed, and the results are returned to the ship's managers before the ship sails again at 5 PM.

So before the next cruise begins, RCCL's captains, dining-room managers, housekeepers, and entertainers know how the previous cruise went -- from praise to serious problems. Imagine what flying the big airlines would be like if you got a comment card at the end of each flight -- and the company acted on what it learned.