Breakthrough Customer Service: Best Practices of Leaders in Customer Support

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

This is the heavyweight in today’s flood of customer service books for
managers. Brown has assembled material from some 40 contributors and
organized it to create a practical how-to for the owner/executive
attempting to create a client-centred organization.

Brown’s main themes are strategy, technology, and people management.
The book is short on peppy stories about smile-training. Rather, it is
strong on technical details, with in-depth examinations for methods for
analyzing quality, benchmarking, and call-routing systems.

The work deals with process improvement— including quality audits and
ISO certification, in the context of customer service—and outsourcing
as a means of delivering customer support. It also deals with call
centres—a reflection of the extent to which companies are turning to
technology as a means of improving customer service.

While most of the text is rather dry (only those seriously interested
in the mechanics of making customer service a competitive advantage will
make it past the first section), there are a few great case studies
tucked into the last chapters.

The lack of an index makes it frustrating to use the book as a
reference, but this is partly offset by a point-form outline of the
ideas and topics discussed.

Breakthrough Customer Service captures the sort of material and
expertise a top consultant would bring to a business looking to grow
profits through change. In the right hands, it could become a road map
to corporate success.