Customer Care Excellence – Book Review
If you believe as King Solomon said in Ecclesiasties (1:9) that nothing is new under the sun, then Customer Care Excellence (by Sarah Cook) could just fit your requirements for an excellent guide to the best thinking and research on the subject of looking after customers.
Now in its 5th Edition, author Sarah Cook has read all the noteable musings from Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, Freidrich Reichfeld (The Loyalty Effect), Sandra Vandermerwe, Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business School et al, and passes them on to the reader.
In addition, she covers all the important aspects of good customer care, such as the importance of managers setting the example and driving standards.
She provides plenty of check lists, graphs, charts and diagrams.
In all, Cook does exactly what she sets out to do, which is to produce a reference to best practice in call centres, based on her own experience of helping large and small organizations become customer oriented.
It is practical and useful for anyone ready to plan, introduce and sustain a programme designed to increase customer satisfaction.
But having said all that, it is clearly written before the economic crash, and even before the virtual world began to have such a major impact on our lives. That doesn’t mean to say that all the sound customer care values should be thrown out of the window, it would just be good to know Cook’s take on life in our current, rather uncertain times.
Customer Care Excellence is a highly useful book that provides much useful guidance. But after reading it, one feels a bit like coming out of a dark room into a very different world.
“Customer Care Excellence – How to create an effective customer focus” is published by Kogan Page, price £19.95.