• The Best Service Is No ServiceBill Price and David Jaffe, 2008The case for contacts per order, from the man who ran Amazon’s early customer service. Read it for the seven principles and the idea that every contact reason has an owner.
• From Worst to FirstGordon Bethune, 1998The Continental turnaround in the chief executive’s own words. Read it for how one shared, visible number changed an organization, and read Knez and Simester for why.
• The Effortless ExperienceMatthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick DeLisi, 2013The book-length version of the effort argument. Take the design rules; be skeptical of the single-question score, for the reasons in chapter 9.
• “The Psychology of Waiting Lines”David Maister, 1985A short essay that explains why an unexplained, uncertain wait feels longer than a known one. The theory behind every delay notice.
• “Toward an Understanding of the Economics of Apologies”Basil Halperin, Benjamin Ho, John List and Ian Muir, 2022The Uber field experiment. Read the message wording and the results on repeated apologies before you write another template.
• “Service Recovery Paradox: A Meta-Analysis”Celso de Matos, Jorge Henrique and Carlos Rossi, 2007The paper to hand anyone who says a failure is an opportunity. Satisfaction, yes. Repurchase, no.
• “Operational Transparency”Ryan Buell, Harvard Business Review, 2019The practitioner’s summary of the research behind chapter 6, on why showing the work makes customers value it more.

The research behind each chapter is listed in Appendix C.