Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

The Best Service is No Service describes how to operate call centers, interactive voice response (IVR) units, Web sites, and other mechanisms for facilitating interactions with customers. The guiding principle for all customer interactions should be to reassure customers, empower them, and serve them well. The final objective, of course, is to ensure that customers find it as easy as possible to buy from you. But, as Price and Jaffe persuasively demonstrate, no one is going to buy from you if they don’t trust you and have confidence in your service, and they will only develop that trust if they judge that their interactions with you were efficient and customer-oriented.

Interacting with masses of customers, individually, is a complicated and difficult business function that most companies have only begun wrestling with in the last decade or so, because the Worldwide Web has finally forced them to. There are a handful of businesses that did a sterling job – prior to the Web’s arrival – of using their call centers to inspire confidence and trust in their customers (USAA, for example). But for the vast majority of companies, prior to the rise of the Web, call centers were mostly treated as just one more cost of doing business.

“Customer interaction,” in other words, is still a brand new discipline for most business people, with lots of unknown complications and unappreciated benefits. I know that many executives charged with supervising the “customer experience” or trying to structure their company’s many interactions with individual customers have trouble articulating the case for earning customer trust. If you’re in this situation yourself, then you need to read Price and Jaffe’s new book.