Alex McLachlan Senior Consultant

The Best Service is No Service by Bill Price and David Jaffe is an excellent book that ought to be compulsory reading for all companies with a customer service element, mostly because so many of them are so very far from providing even reasonable service.

Note: their use of "No Service" in the title is a misnomer - their book is very much in agreement with John Seddon's work, that you need to focus on the service that provides value to the customer, and provide that service well.

The book gives clear, practical advice and loads of examples of where service has gone wrong and of best practice (plenty of examples from Amazon and first direct for instance in this category).

A few of the most significant points they make are:

• Good quality self service has major benefits, making it easier for users to do what they want, when they want and significantly reduce operational costs
• Get rid of unnecessary reasons for people to contact you ("dumb contacts" is the phrase they use in the book) - eliminate contacts that have no value to the customer and no value to the organisation
• Value those contacts and relationships that are most important to you and have the greatest benefit to the organisation
• Gather metrics on what people are trying to find out about, both on the website and through calls
• "Service" is not just the province of a contact / service centre, it is equally important across the whole operation