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

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 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.