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.

You Can Do It Too, Rachel Bridge

Published by Kogan Page

Buy it now from Blackwell Books

Success tips

Rachel Bridge is the Enterprise Editor for The Sunday Times and she has already written two best sellers on the topic of entrepreneurial success – How I Made It and My Big Idea.

In her previous books she documented 70 successful entrepreneurs and their ideas. Here she looks at ‘20 essential things every budding entrepreneur should know’.

Chapter by chapter she explores these essentials, illustrating them with examples from successful business peoples’ experiences. Each chapter culminates in a more detailed success story in which a self-made millionaire emphasises the ‘lesson’.

Many of the fabulously successful featured will be familiar names, for instance James Murray Wells of Glasses Direct and Hilary Devey of Pall-Ex who featured recently in The Secret Millionaire on Channel 4.

Sometimes of course she states the blindingly obvious - for example, you need to know what you are trying to achieve or you should be careful who you take on as partners – but other chapters reveal things that may not instantly come to mind in the flush of entrepreneurial enthusiasm.

There is also a heartening tailpiece that completely goes against much of the advice given. Edward Perry persevered with his ready-meals company Cook against all the signs that it was a loser – his family didn’t want to invest, the banks turned him down and his first attempts were, by his own admission, ‘terrible’. But he believed in his idea and soldiered on. He now has 21 shops and a projected £18 million turnover for 2008.

Once again Ms Bridge has written a highly interesting and, for the budding entrepreneur, valuable book.