In a business that’s doing customer service brilliantly, is “the customer always right?” Not necessarily, say Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, co authors of Uncommon Service and consultants on organizational excellence. To research their book, they conducted a study of companies large and small around the world. The number one obstacle that organizations were coming up against time and time again? Trying to be great at everything at once.“In our worldview,” says Frei, “excellence equals design times culture.” Designing a great customer-oriented business, she observes, means deciding strategically what to do well and what to do badly. Assessing what matters most to your customers and will give you a competitive advantage, and focusing your resources on that alone.Culture, on the other hand, is the company-wide set of values that helps people decide what to do (and what not to do) when the complexity of the business and the unpredictability of customers takes them outside the emp...