Committing to excellent customer service standards is a sure way for businesses of all sizes to stand out from the competition. Through interviews with more than 500 executives, Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati, author of Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Organization, found that effective customer service starts with paying attention to your customers. Here are five tips for better customer service:

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1. Coordinate employees and departments. Align your tasks and information around a customer axis. At Best Buy, a conversation between two managers revealed that customers would often comparison shop at nearby high-end electronics retailers. These chance remarks led to the Magnolia Home Theater, Best Buy’s store-within-a-store where customers can test out high-end branded home entertainment equipment.

2. Cooperate. Align your behavior around common customer-focused goals. If coordination is about what leaders do, cooperation is what workers do. That’s why Cisco insists that every employee talk directly with customers at least once a month — even the folks in human resources.

3. Give your employees clout. Enable individuals to take on meaningful silo-busting roles in your business and ultimately enhance the outside-in responsiveness needed in a shifting market. Transferring power from regional units to a centralized customer information warehouse enabled Harrah’s casinos to build a national brand that customers could count on, no matter which location they visited.

4. Expand your capabilities. Encourage the boundary-spanning skills that managers and employees need to develop to cope with customers’ changing needs. Jones Lang Lasalle mandated that account managers spend time within each of the firm’s major units to gain greater knowledge.

5. Make connections. To achieve sustainable customer-centricity, leverage the extraordinary value of effective partners. For instance, Apple sells only a small number of applications for its iPhone, but because of its partners, it can offer 10,000 applications.

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