Xerox still makes copy machines, sells toner and fixes broken office equipment. But its fastest growing segment does not market a physical product.

The home-equity loan industry is crowded with competitors, making it tough for mortgage companies to hang onto market share — much less grow revenue, according to Brad Connor, president of Chase Home Equity, who recently spoke at the 18th Annual Compete Through Service Symposium, sponsored by the

Chris Zane goes to work every day with a smile on his face, buoyed by his philosophy that "most of the population are good and sound and trustworthy people." Sound naïve? Perhaps. But Zane apparently knows what he's talking about.

It looks like a recipe for a customer-service nightmare: A company offers a product that is inconsistent, the frontline employees are mostly part-timers who don't work directly for the organization, and many of the customers have been drinking alcohol.

PetSmart was designed to be a category killer with dominant prices and dominant variety when it was founded in the late 1980s, and the concept worked well for the company's first decade. But by the late 1990s the company was losing steam.

Creating a great product or service is just the first step on a company's road to success. It's also necessary for your potential customers to know about that great product or service. So how does a company go about developing a successful customer focus strategy?

Where would YouTube be today if not for its millions of users? What good would Wikipedia be without all of those contributors? And how successful could IKEA possibly be if its customers weren't willing to assemble their own furniture?

The idea behind services blueprinting is fairly simple: Companies put themselves in their customers' shoes to find out what's working, what's not, and what needs to be changed.

The new consumer sensibility, widely heralded in the business press, is the Experience Economy. Our world of mediated, staged and multi-sensory experience — an increasingly unreal world — gives rise to people desiring authentic or "real" experiences. But what is authenticity?

The customer is king, an old service mantra says. But today a few industry leaders argue the employee, not the customer, is most important.