Best Service Is No Service, The

• 75% of CEOs in the U.S. believe they provide above-average customer service.
• 59% of consumers are dissatisfied with their most recent customer service experience.
• The gap points to a need for a new approach.

With the ever-present need to reduce costs and boost customer loyalty, Bill Price argues that companies should challenge the need for customer service in the first place. This game-changing approach treats service as a data point of dysfunction since it is almost always needed either to fix mistakes or to resolve customer confusion.

Sharing examples from his experiences in the U.S. Navy and with MCI and Amazon, as well as those of companies such as Toyota that engineer out the need for customer service, Price outlines seven principles of best service. He emphasizes that no technology is necessary in order to adopt a “no service” mindset. Any manager can ferret out contacts between customer and company to create self-correcting systems, reduce demand, and leverage self-service options actually preferred by customers.