Customer Service

The book I read to research this post was Brilliant Customer Service by Debra Stevens which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

The Brilliant series of books covers many aspects of business and psychological subjects and I think they did used to cover software, mainly adobe and microsoft products. This book is very interesting and looks for examples for good customer service from companies like Amazon & Stena. Stena empowers its customer service personnel that they can spend up to 1,000 euros solving customer problems at their discretion. One example of Amazon customer service is when you buy a book on their websites they offer 3 books on a similar subject with out any hard sell but a lot of customers do find that quite helpful including me. Often when a customer has a problem they don't just want someone to solve it they also want someone to listen to them. Many customer service representatives are almost on auto pilot and listen to so much of the problem and then think they have the solution. Each case should be treated as unique and you can get it wrong with that approach. Also many companies think if they don't get many complaints that means customers are happy but the vast majority of unhappy customers don't complain and simply don't come back not to mention tell all their friends about the bad experience. It's important to do customer feedback and also monitor what is being said about your company online and where appropriate answer them. Of course all the big companies try and do this. I really enjoyed reading this book which does a good job of explaining things and is a reasonable length at around 180 pages.