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.

While most companies agree on the importance of a loyal customer base, it remains an elusive goal. Many companies that track customer satisfaction quickly become frustrated and sometimes abandon loyalty efforts, according to Dr.

User communities, usually associated with technology products, help customers connect with each other and the brand. User communities are not just for computer products, however. An exceptional example of developing and sustaining an active, dynamic user community is Harley-Davidson Motorcycles.

China is no stranger to revolution, so it's hardly surprising that the country's business leaders and academics are talking about an approaching service revolution that will transform the manufacturing behemoth into a leading global services provider.