In their book The Best Service is No Service, Bill Price and David Jaffe convey a distruptive idea.
When customers buy a product or service, they want to enjoy it, not interact with the company they bought it from. A call or email to our contact centre is always a sign that something has gone wrong.
Therefore, the aim of companies should not be to improve their customer service, but to ensure that their customers never have to use it.
The Best Service is no Service philosophy was implemented by Bill Price when he was Vice President of Customer Service at Amazon and is one of the reasons why Amazon has become one of the most efficient companies in the world.
In order to successfully implement this management model, the authors offer a framework with 7 main principles:
- Eliminate all useless, repetitive and low value contacts. To do this, always identify the root cause of the customer calling your contact centre and work to eliminate the contact.
- Create a self-service that your customers will love. The easier it is for them to do their own things, the less they will bother you.
- Be proactive. If there is a problem, notify your customer through automated messages. This avoids expensive incoming calls and emails.
- Open the doors. Make it really easy for your customers to contact you. They will contact you before the problem becomes unsolvable.
- Hold the department responsible and charge the costs to the department that originates the incoming calls. This way everyone will prevent them from occurring.
- Listen to what your customers are telling you. They are your main source of information
- Deliver extraordinary customer experiences. The few calls and errands your employees have to do, make them of the highest quality. Have your agents motivated and trained to melt the “snowballs”.
A highly recommended book, which is a few years old now, but which is essential to understand that in Customer Service, as in so many other areas of the company, success does not come from doing things correctly, but from doing the right things.
