For Service, Please Hold

Inc. writer reviews seven new books on customer service.

Tweet

The new books on customer service set a bad example

Here's what happened on a recent rainy Wednesday:

The dishwasher, which had been repaired on Monday, flooded the kitchen floor again. Not to worry, said the helpful person at the appliance store, someone will be over "between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m." Tuesday. With my shoes still squishing, I head to the office -- or try to. The train is late. When it shows up, there aren't enough seats, and the heater has gone berserk. I want to complain, but no one answers the transit department's toll-free customer-service number. Things aren't any better when I finally get to work. The copier is out again; I can't get anyone at our Boston office to answer the phone; and my lunch plans go awry when the fancy French restaurant "loses" my reservation.

Welcome to the service economy, where lousy service is now the norm. This sad fact hasn't escaped the notice of publishers. They have recently put out dozens of books, all promising to give your company the customer-pleasing powers of a Disney, a McDonald's, or a Scandinavian Airlines System. But like most other promises of the service economy, this one doesn't hold up very well. The first problem is that these books aren't written by the likes of Walt Disney, Ray Kroc, or Jan Carlzon. They're almost always written by consultants. The information is secondhand. The writing is second-rate. Short sentences, active verbs, and clear images are as hard to come by as a friendly banker. That would be tolerable if the authors provided good examples or practical tips -- say, 10 things you can do to keep customers coming back. But they don't. Their cop-out is that each business is different so their advice has to be general.

Phooey.

I have pretty much the same expectations when my recently repaired dishwasher breaks as when I'm forced to stand on an overcrowded train: I want to get what I've paid for. And when I buy a book, I like it to live up to the promise in its title.

It seems to me that the essence of customer service is simple: treat the customer with respect, give him more than he expects, and make the experience of dealing with your company as easy as possible. While some of these books are OK at explaining one aspect, none is particularly good at explaining how to do all three. So what's a reader to do?

I'm tempted to suggest you simply reread the Golden Rule. It remains the best short description of customer service ever written. But magazines, too, are part of the service economy. To provide good customer service, we have to be more than just glib. So here's our suggestion. Don't buy any of these books. Instead, go to your local library and construct your own customer-service manual by mixing and matching various chapters.

Before you begin, however, read Philip Crosby's Quality Is Free (McGraw-Hill, 1979). Yes, you can find better-written books, but Crosby will remind you that it's always cheaper to do the job right the first time. Next, crack the spine on Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr.'s In Search of Excellence (Harper & Row, 1982). If you are in a hurry, just read Chapter 6. You'll learn that the easiest way to find out what customers want is to be there when they want to tell you.

With the background out of the way, begin your customer-service book with the first three chapters (47 pages) of Service America! by Karl Albrecht and Ron Zemke (Dow Jones-Irwin, 1985). There is much to hate about this book. The authors quote themselves at the beginning of most chapters. They also draw the bulk of their material from consulting work they've done, and it's hard to see the relevance of many examples if you're not in the amusement park business. As far as I can tell, moreover, the authors lack any sense of humor.

Still, the opening chapters explain clearly why this customer-service stuff is important and will become more so in coming years. Competing on price takes you only so far, after all. And the automation of almost everything (soda dispensers, airplane ticket vending machines, automatic teller machines, and so on) gives greater significance to each encounter between a customer and a real live customer-service person. What all this means, argue Albrecht (a consultant) and Zemke (an editor at Training magazine), is that your company's approach to customer service has to change.

But how should you change it? Start with The Customer Is Key by Milind M. Lele (John Wiley & Sons, 1987) -- or rather start with two small parts of it. Lele desperately needs an editor. For one thing, he uses the same example over and over again. The fact that Jaguar used to make terrible cars and had a miserable service organization is pointed out eight separate times. What's more, Lele's economic graphs are a joke: he plots out the cost of customer service as a commodity, which it can't be by definition. Finally, his writing could cure insomnia. I could provide a quote or two, but trust me.

 1 | 2  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Sales and Marketing Newsletter

Email Address: