Last week I had the great privilege of attending a customer service workshop hosted by one of Balihoo's investors, OpenView Venture Partners. The workshop was lead by Bill Price, who with David Jaffe, co-authored the book The Best Service Is No Service: How To Liberate Your Customers From Customer Service, Keep Them Happy & Control Costs.
The workshop focused on the seven principles of the book (which I would recommend for anyone who may EVER come in contact with a customer) and engaged the participants with plenty of hands-on tasks and group activities. Bill had a lot of great advice for the small group of attending tech companies, which wasn't surprising, coming from his background as Amazon's first Global VP of Customer Service.
The fundamental principle he emphasized again and again was to challenge the need for customer service, not just meet the demand for it. In the context of the SaaS (software as a service) industry, the message particularly rang true with our driving quest to create intuitive software products that deliver engaging self-service. Bill challenged us to proactively identify the root cause of our customers' needs and get ahead of them to deliver solutions long before someone has to pick up the phone or type an email to a customer service team.
For Balihoo's local marketing and co-op advertising solution, we realized right away that Bill's approach to providing not just great service, but 'Best Service' was soon to become an integral part of our entire company. Because Balihoo's service offering goes beyond simply supporting the users of our software to delivering comprehensive local marketing and media planning services, everyone in our office is customer facing in one way or another. I believe that this additional service component of our company is what separates us from most other software companies, and makes Bill's ideas all the more applicable to our mission to revolutionize local marketing.
I'm excited to implement the Best Services principles in our office and I am confident our customers will agree!
The workshop focused on the seven principles of the book (which I would recommend for anyone who may EVER come in contact with a customer) and engaged the participants with plenty of hands-on tasks and group activities. Bill had a lot of great advice for the small group of attending tech companies, which wasn't surprising, coming from his background as Amazon's first Global VP of Customer Service.The fundamental principle he emphasized again and again was to challenge the need for customer service, not just meet the demand for it. In the context of the SaaS (software as a service) industry, the message particularly rang true with our driving quest to create intuitive software products that deliver engaging self-service. Bill challenged us to proactively identify the root cause of our customers' needs and get ahead of them to deliver solutions long before someone has to pick up the phone or type an email to a customer service team.
For Balihoo's local marketing and co-op advertising solution, we realized right away that Bill's approach to providing not just great service, but 'Best Service' was soon to become an integral part of our entire company. Because Balihoo's service offering goes beyond simply supporting the users of our software to delivering comprehensive local marketing and media planning services, everyone in our office is customer facing in one way or another. I believe that this additional service component of our company is what separates us from most other software companies, and makes Bill's ideas all the more applicable to our mission to revolutionize local marketing.
I'm excited to implement the Best Services principles in our office and I am confident our customers will agree!
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