Bare Knuckle Customer Service, Simon Hazeldine & Chris Norton

Buy it now from Blackwell Books

Published by Lean Marketing Press


If your customers are so important to you, why is your customer service so bad?

That is the question posed by the authors right at the start. And it’s true, isn’t it? Who is not daily driven to despair by the antics of organisations claiming that the customer is king – and then treating that same customer like dirt?

Now don’t judge this book by its (horrendous) cover – there are lashings of good advice packed into these 150 or so pages.

Beginning with the above question, the authors go on to pose several more, such as ‘why bother?’ and ‘can customer service influence profits?’ and to answer them with common sense arguments and numerous examples from their and others’ business lives.

From building a customer service strategy to recruiting the right people; from empowerment to service targets to complaints, performance improvement and, call centres they cover pretty well everything and anything that could conceivably come under the remit of customer service. And best of all is my favourite section; just two pages of ‘the 5 most stupid things to say to a customer’ all of which have been said to me and, I’m willing to bet, to you.

My only reservations – the aforementioned cover and a somewhat too liberal use of exclamation marks. Otherwise well worth reading.