The Best Service Is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs »

Bill Price is president of Driva Solutions, the North American arm of LimeBridge, a customer service consultancy whose clients include Dell, Hyatt, McDonald’s, Microsoft, and TiVo. Prior to founding Driva Solutions, Bill was Amazon.com’s first vice president of Global Customer Service, a vice president at MCI, and a senior consultant with McKinsey & Company. A frequent keynote speaker, Price has written numerous articles and white papers.

Most customer service operations have it wrong. They gauge their effectiveness and productivity based on the number of customer calls or contacts they handle. But do your customers really want a “relationship” with your company’s customer service department, or do they simply want to purchase your products or services so they can put them to use?

In this groundbreaking book, Bill Price and David Jaffe offer a new, game-changing approach, showing how managers are taking the wrong path and are using the wrong metrics to measure customer service. Customer service, they assert, is only needed when a company does something wrong - eliminating the need for service is the best way to satisfy customers. To be successful, companies need to treat service as a data point of dysfunction and figure what they need to do to eliminate the demand. The Best Service Is No Service outlines these seven principles to deliver the best service that ultimately leads to “no service”:

• Eliminate dumb contacts
• Create engaging self-service
• Be proactive
• Make it easy to contact your company
• Own the actions across the company
• Listen and act
• Deliver great service experiences

While self-service and customer relationship management are often tech-heavy and software-driven efforts, Price and Jaffe emphasize that no technology is needed to adopt a “no service” mindset - and any manager who tries to ferret out dysfunctional contacts between customers and companies can create far better, self-correcting systems.

Introduction: Why We Wrote This Book     xi
Challenge Customer Demand for Service: Instead of Coping with Demand     1
Eliminate Dumb Contacts: Instead of Handling Them Again and Again     29
Create Engaging Self-Service: Instead of Preventing Contact     65
Be Proactive: Instead of Waiting to Respond     99
Make It Really Easy to Contact Your Company: Instead of Dodging the Bullet     125
Own the Actions Across the Organization: Instead of Blaming Customer Service     165
Listen and Act: Instead of Letting Customer Insights Slip Away     203
Deliver Great Service Experiences: How to Delight Customers with Awesome Support When They Need It     241
Best Service Survey     277
Glossary     287
Bibliography     293
Notes     299
Acknowledgments     301
About the Authors     305
Index     307