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OWL
BOOK REVIEW AVIARY
Seybold,
Patricia B. with Ronni T. Marshak and Jeffrey M. Lewis.
Seybold has a strong track record with her customer service books, so her latest one will probably do quite well. Her main point is that customers get to decide what happens in the market. I wish she would tell this good piece of news to some of the suppliers we deal with at TMI and ones I personally deal with. She (or her coauthors) write, "Thanks to the Internet and to mobile wireless devices, customers are challenging and disrupting the standard practices in virtually every industry." This might be true if we could get in contact with them. Having just spent several hours attempting to reach a supplier, and getting my e-mails bounced back to me, doesn't make me feel much in control. Her advice here is not that much different from her previous advice, nor is it different from that of many others in the field. One of her strongest points is that companies should develop strong relationships with customers. She does suggest that, in the future, people will assess a company's stock value based on the strength of its customer relationships. Reading Seybold's book reminds me of a Stew Leonard statement I like that a business colleague sent to me. Leonard is quoted as saying, "I equate customer service to losing weight—it's the kind of thing everybody knows about but is hard to do. Before you embrace it, you have to look in the mirror and say, 'Do I believe?'" I think the last part of this statement should be, "Do I really want to do it?" Customer service is absolutely like losing weight. Most people who are a little overweight, which seems to be most Americans, know they should do it. Most people go on diets. They try it for awhile. Then they revert to their old patterns when they get hungry. They want the latest diet fad and are genuinely shocked when it doesn't work. They want a change only if it will have to be done for a little while, allowing them to revert to eating habits that used to work years ago. All these things happen with customer service as well! Organizations know they should do it. They try one thing and then another. They let it go when the organization begins to show poor financial performance. Yet, we also know that when a person truly wants to to lose weight, it's remarkably easy—compared to when that same person thinks he should lose weight but doesn't really want to. Customer
service is not that difficult when an organization makes
a commitment to it and when they understand that it's the
customer's way or it's no way. Seybold certainly makes
this point, and for this point alone, her book deserves a
positive rating! Janelle
Barlow, President
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