Service Magic: The Art of Amazing Your Customers

Citation

Gemmel, P. (2005), "Service Magic: The Art of Amazing Your Customers", International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 315-315. https://doi.org/10.1108/09564230510601422

“Amazing your customers” is a wish of every service manager. Throughout this book Ron Zemke and Chip Bell share their powerful bag of service tricks to help service organisations to amaze their customers. Service magic is compared to stage magic. Service magic is described as “the response that leaves you more amazed than simply delighted, more awed than wowed”. In this way, service magic is considered as something different from customer delight.

Zemke and Bell convince with this book that creating memorable positive customer services is strikingly parallel in structure and outcome to fine stage magic. The magic is in the place, the process and the performance. Place magic refers to aspects which can be found in the servicescape concepts and which creates an environment where the customer feels approach or avoidance. The nature of the process determines what kind of process magic can be created. In some processes service employees have much more freedom to create magic than in others. Service recovery is considered as an important part of process magic. The performance magic is about how to create a sense of magical connection with customers through understanding, listening, guiding, speaking, etc. Real magic originates where place, process and performance magic comes together.

Behind the art of the magic very clear techniques and skills are hidden. The positive message is that many of these techniques and skills can be learned or trained so that every service provider can create some magic in his performance. This holds for personal services and e‐services. The authors spend a separate chapter at magic in a virtual service world. The many examples and cases of good or best practice in different service companies such as South‐West Airlines, Universal Studios, Wayzate Dental, Children's Memorial Hospital make this book very lively. Although the examples are typical US‐based companies, the readers should be able to translate their experience to their own service environment. The authors further help the readers by giving a summary of the most important tricks or techniques at the end of each chapter and by offering a compendium of helpful tools at the end of the book.

This book is a well‐written, easy‐to‐read (but not always easy to apply) guide for enhancing services with magic. It is oriented towards the practitioner, although service management academics will find a helpful compendium of examples to be used in their courses. In other words, do not expect a high‐level academic work, but a down‐to‐earth book with a lot of examples.

If you have read a good (magic) service management book and you are willing to write a review, please let me know.