Tailoring to the Customer's Experience - moving from a product based to a service based mindset

The idea that today's larger economies have become dominated by service focused businesses as opposed to product manufacturing demands at minimum shifting strategies on how we deal with customers. Creating a product or a service with the client's experience utilises many of the same strategies - sometimes identical - however, but service based businesses place an emphasis on managing customers. Picture one of Dicken's characters selling bread at a market in 19th Century London. Would they have been customer or product focused?  To succeed currently or any other time in history, focusing on the perceptions of the client is essential. The seller would have needed to understand the experience the customer was seeking - a compliment on the customer's clothing, hottest bread at the market, being convinced that the seller's bread would delight their household more than any other bread for sale - the taste or price of the bread might not matter to one, when it was all that mattered to another. Tailoring the product or service to the customer while focusing on the quality of the  product or the service offered is what increases sales and grows business.  Customer bases become resources for the business. Who the bread stand at the market is manned by is an essential part of the customer experience. Offering the product at a price that is competitive while outdoing the competition in service and appeal is what allows the baker to sell more of his bread and increase profits. If Apple were simply concerned with turning out the best computer but offered nothing in the way of tech support or paid scant attention to what having an Apple did for the customer's ego, their bottom line would plummet. Marketing departments look after 'selling a benefit' to appeal to customers; I will suggest that that benefit becomes more complex in a service based business than one that is strictly product based.

Dinner party talk often turns to tales of  'service experience' - be it waiting hours in a line to get a passport, shoddy service at a restaurant, an upset with a health care professional that appears insensitive to an elderly parent's reality.  Complaints centered on airline or hotel nightmares abound - I perceive because there is 'benefit' to the talker being perceived as someone who travels.

What is it about organisations that don't see the benefit in attending to the components that will make their businesses thrive?  I'm thinking of the ones that do pay attention to the product they offer, understanding what defines supreme satisfaction to the customer in terms of service, benefit and product, and managing the staff who make the product and offer the service.  Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Oliver and Bonacini restaurants, Westjet and Southwest Airlines, Four Seasons Hotels, Mountain Equipment Co-op come to mind.