The Best Service Is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy & Control Costs

By Bill Price and David Jaffe
Published by Jossey Bass, May 08

With over 40 years of combined experience and expertise in customer service, authors Bill Price and David Jaffe are challenging how companies identify, measure and address customer service issues in the new book, The Best Service is No Service.

The Best Service is No Service contends that customer service managers have been getting it wrong for years, choosing to ‘cope’ with demand for service and gauging effectiveness and productivity on the number of customer contacts they handle. Instead, these managers need to realise customer service is a fundamental data point of dysfunction and the best customer service would be to preemptively challenge the demand.

Price and Jaffe have packed The Best Service is No Service with first-hand experience and knowledge gained from working with some of the world’s largest organisations, including Amazon and the US Internal Revenue Service. Together, they have also detailed seven ‘best service’ principles to help deliver the type of service that ultimately leads to no service:
- eliminating dumb contacts
- engaging in self-service
- being proactive
- providing easy ways to contact the company
- owning the company’s actions
- listening and acting
- and delivering great customer experiences.

The Best Service is No Service challenges customer service managers to diagnose the core of the problems, not just to treat the symptoms. Pushed along by Price and Jaffe, managers will realise it’s not enough to just cope anymore.

Download a chapter here

About the authors
Bill Price is President of Driva Solutions, a boutique customer experience consultancy whose clients include Apple, Dell, Hyatt, Microsoft, and TiVo. Prior to founding Driva, Bill was Amazon.com's first VP of Global Customer Service. During his tenure, Amazon reduced customer contacts-per-order by 70% and scored the second highest customer satisfaction rating in history. Before Amazon, Bill was consultant at McKinsey & Company and was a senior manager at MCI. In 2004, Bill was named one of 10 global "CRM Gurus." 
David Jaffe is Consulting Director of Limebridge Australia where he helps banks, insurance companies, and utilities improve service and sales. He previously ran the Asia Pacific CRM practice for Accenture where he was associate partner.

ISBN 987-0-470-18908-5;  Hardback;  £14.99 / €18.70

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