In The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs, authors Bill Price and David Jaffe seek to challenge the traditional view of customer service.

While the title is a bit daring, “no service” isn’t really the solution the authors are proposing. Through an eight step process, they outline how your company can refine its customer service by identifying and fixing problems and enabling customers via self-service.

Prevention

A majority of customer service problems can be resolved up-front by identifying the root cause of issues. These may be problems with packaging, customer expectations, instructions, etc. Your company can prevent problems from even happening by having a feedback loop, ensuring that those who hear from the customers send the information back to those that can fix the problem.

Self Service

The real “no service” option is that of quality self-service. With current technology, customers should be able to solve the majority of their problems via your website or even your phone system. If customers can find the answers they need online and can take corrective action, they will solve their own problems.

Listen and Act

Too many times the customer service department insulates the rest of a company from customer feedback. R&D, Marketing, Sales, Manufacturing, IT, and others need to hear what is wrong so they can actually fix it! Listen to your customers and act on that information. Otherwise, you’ll just keep getting the same inquiries and issues every day.

Joe’s Recommendation

Buy a Copy – The Best Service is No Service will change the way your company thinks about customer service.

They share numerous examples of both the good, the bad, and the ugly. You’ll see how other companies were successful (or not) in serving customers and can then apply those principles to your situation. This was a very thought provoking book.

Buy The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs on Amazon.com.

Return Customer turns 3 years old this week! Thank you, loyal readers, for making this another great year.

I once again reviewed the data on how people arrive at this site. There seem to be some perennial favorites among the most read and referring sites when compared to last year.

Top 5 Most Read Posts

Based on traffic data, these were the top most visited posts this past year:

1. How to Get People Talking About You
2. Think Outside Your Constraints
3. Four Customer Expectations
4. Clever Auto Reply Email Address
5. Your Small Business is Worth More than a Free Email Address

Top 5 Referrers

Thanks to these non-search sites that were generous in linking to Return Customer over the past year:

1. The Aweber blog has mentioned several of my articles over the past year.
2. 9rules - I’m a member of 9rules’ business and marketing communities
3. Service Untitled offers solid customer service articles and interviews.
4. Smiley Cat - Featured in the Typography for Headlines gallery
5. Particle Tree and their “Guide to Email Roundup“

Top 5 Searches

The following searches (linked to their respective posts) brought the most people to this site last year. It is always interesting to see the diversity of incoming keywords and phrases:

1. customer expectations
2. southwestairlines@mail.southwest.com
3. honesty is the best policy
4. proactive customer service
5. digiorno pizza coupons

If you have any comments on things you like or that could be improved with Return Customer, please leave a comment or send me an email.

I look forward to celebrating four years in 2009!