written in 2024
This is my favorite book to recommend to people trying to do more with less. While it's somewhat targeted at Support professionals, it is good reading for leaders in any organization, and reveals some surprising results of a lot of deep research about what customers really want, which is not what anyone is saying when they talk about customer service in their business!
I hear people aspire to have great customer service by making it something active:
These are of course true and/or to some degree "good", but there is something better than all of them! I'd argue that all of those are reactive rather than active, and this book argues that what really keeps customers coming back is not a great response to problems - but instead the problem not happening in the first place, or at worst, a customer's ability to quickly and easily self-serve on fixing a problem.
So, assuming you have infinite resources and can just fix your product/service to never have problems and make it completely obvious or intuitive to use, you don't need a support team or function within your organization! Congratulations, and please work on world hunger as your organization's next objective :)
But, since having sufficient resources to solve all problems matches approximately 0 peoples' reality, the book talks in depth about what we *can* do when a customer needs help. A really good way to approach this situation is not from a "no problems exist" point of view, but instead from the angle of "how can we avoid making it worse once a customer experiences a problem they need our help with?"
Among the methods my favorite - and one I preach to all teams I've ever worked with - is a concept called "next issue avoidance". Don't "just" tell a customer how to use a feature, help them understand how to use it to achieve their goal. Don't give a refund for a wrong recurring charge without preventing it from happening again. Don't coach a customer on a workflow that they can't accomplish without making some other adjustments, without advising them about those adjustments in the same breath.
This often means some additional effort for your teams - be they documentation ("how it works, and watch out for these sharp edges!"), support ("you asked about X, but I think you'll want to know about Y and Z as well", billing ("here's a refund, and I've ensured that this incorrect charge won't recur in the future.", or even development ("we now validate the inpput in our UI, but also clarified what correct values mean right next to the field you need to input data into.") This effort isn't, of course, strictly necessary at the time of customer contact - and usually the customer doesn't think to ask for it. But, as the book describes and as we have all experienced, as frustrating as it is to need to ask for (and likely wait for) help from your service provider, it's an order of magnitude more frustrating to have to ask for MORE help again, on the same/reated topic which a reasonably intelligent expert could have seen looming. And our customers correctly assume that our teams should be made up of such experts.
One of the book's main points is that having a good customer support experience is good, but having a bad one is terrible - and is more likely to drive the customer away AND lead them to driving other customers away. Next Issue Avoidance is one powerful way not to create terrible experiences, whose cost to your business is outsized.
This is one of few "business books" that I would recommend, and while it can be a little bit dry at times, it's more engaging than most others in the genre.