Excuses, Excuses, Excuses: For Not Delivering Excellent Customer Service --- And What Should Happen!

EXCUSES, EXCUSES, EXCUSES may be one of the most important training tools for all of your employees. They don't have to be the ones on the "front lines," people manning the phones or e-mail contacts for customer service. Doane and his partner, Rose Sloat, have diagnosed the problem of faulty customer service and they accurately see it as a pandemic that proceeds from the top down. Let's face it, if your CEO could care less about customer service, none of your customers are going to find you have made it a priority. That's why this book may actually turn the tide in a beleaguered industry. Everyone wants to be shown a little respect. We've all been through situations in which, for one reason or another, we have been treated badly and we would like redress. As Doane and Sloat point out, this happens in our personal lives as well. Customers return to sites of commerce where they have been recognized as human, interpellated and really "seen," sometimes for the first time. However we all have our excuses for why we really didn't go the whole nine yards for our customers. And one of them might well be, "It is not our company policy to please our customers." Let's face it, there are many organizations, even service organizations, in which customers are not as important as, say, overhead or bottom-line profitability. And the short-sighted cost-cutters often argue that "we don't really need customer service because they're going to buy from us anyhow." Wrong! That's just another excuse, in the finely tuned analysis of Canton, Ohio-based educators Darryl Doane and Rose D. Sloat. Their book is by turns hard-hitting and sort of humorous, with many a doleful anecdote. It reads very easily. It could have been a bit longer I think. But hopefully they will have a sequel of sorts coming out through their innovative "Learning Service" family of experiences. Listen to these two. They have been there, on both sides of the fence, and they know of whereof they speak.