“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.
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
The advice should transform customer experience where it is poor and have a major impact on the bottom line of companies who take notice.
It is interesting to think about how this impacts on the NFP sector. I think the key issues are:
NFP organisations are different from the Amazons and BTs of this world. The relationships with their key stakeholders (particularly members / supporters) are more complex and long term, especially where it forms an important part of their career development or social engagement. This makes the following points even more important.
It shows the need for joined-up service, which is likely to be across the whole set of services and interactions - knowing about the member or supporter and their interests across all departments, not just the contact centre and using that information to provide excellent service.
Route calls and enquiries to the people who are best suited to provide the best answer.
Give ownership of important relationships to the most appropriate department (not necessarily the contact centre).
It is particularly important to provide good self service.
The two key IT elements of this are:
The website needs to have good self service functionality and provide information to eliminate the need for people to phone / email. So, people should be able to update their details, make donations, pay their subscriptions, book events, etc.
The CRM needs to be interfaced to the website and be the repository for contact history, preferences, areas of interest and information needed for marketing.
Also available: ebook version
, respected CIO commentator Chris Potts sets out his views in a very easy to read fashion. His main themes are that having IT as a separate department has failed to deliver business benefits from investment, that IT should be (largely) integrated into the business units and that initiatives should be treated as