REVIEW: The Customer Rules by Lee Cockerell

Date:                         4/15/13

Title:                         The Customer Rules: The 39 Essential Rules for Delivering Sensational Service

Author:                    Lee Cockerell

ISBN 13:                   978-0770435608

Pages:                      208

Publisher:               Crown Business

Cover:                      Paperback

Rating:                    3 Stars

Ironically, I am currently working on a customer service project. It seems that the days of customer service, let alone good customer service, is a distant memory. Now most

customers call into a call center for service and what they receive is a overworked employee that is required to read from a generic script. Sadly, one size does not fit all.

Even though this book has some great tips on getting and keeping customers, the people at the top must change their strategies. Having worked in customer service for nearly fifteen years, I found that companies can hire great customer care employees, but if a company’s bottom line is making money and following a one-size-fits-all robotic scripts to service all its customers, customer service will not make a comeback. On the other hand, if these same companies who continue to hire non-qualified caring individuals, they will not continue to succeed.

Rule number eight talks about being professional and this is something that has long disappeared in customer service. There are other valuable rules in this book, but none if it will mean a thing unless companies start caring more about their employees and their customers instead of lining their wallets. This book would have been great ten years ago, but the author may be a little over zealous with this title as it pertains to mid-sized to large corporations. However, smaller businesses may benefit from these rules.