The ABCs of Internet Customer Service

Alaska Business Monthly, July, 2001 by Henry Holtzman

The Customer Revolution: How to Thrive When Customers are in Control

Patricia B. Seybold with Ronni T. Marshak and Jeffrey M. Lewis Crown Business (Random House)

New York, NY

2001, 395 pages, $27.50

Pat Seybold has based her career on proving to people who run businesses on the Internet the continuing truth of the old business adage: "The customer is always right." If at first the author seems to be demonstrating that she is master of the obvious, Seybold and her associates deserve more credit than that. What they are offering is advice that is at once both simple and sophisticated.

On one level the author is re-stating the obvious: If you don't have customers you don't have a business. On a second level she points out that if you become too enmeshed in your back-room software processes, you run the danger of ignoring the increasing need by customers to simplify the buying process.

The third level is the most sophisticated of all. She highlights the need to continually assess your customers' satisfaction. In e-commerce, customer service is far more than a method of giving dissatisfied clients an opportunity to vent.

It's a marketing tool that gives you the opportunity to do low-cost marketing research, analyze organizational effectiveness and estimate product success. Most of all you're getting the information from the best possible source, your present customers.

The first third of the book is familiar ground to those who read the author's previous work, Customers.com. The major difference in this book is the addition of considerable how-to information including roll-outs, monitoring customer information and mass customization. The latter category is one of the hottest areas of e-business. It permits a high degree of individual finishing of a standard product. For example, a customer can choose from three or four standard athletic shoe patterns, but individually requested color combinations; names and slogans can be placed on the shoes when they're ordered.

One of the most interesting sections of the book deals with a major strength of e-commerce: fast changes of directions. Seybold offers guidance in this area, which she calls "changing directions on the fly." These include...

"1. Leverage Your Branded Experience ... keep your brand in customers' faces.

"2. Invest in Core Infrastructure and Operational Excellence ... include everything from your call center operations to your fulfillment and delivery processes.

"3. Leverage Your Core Services as an Asset ... offer a set of highly refined and tested e-commerce services.

"4. Start with Trusted Leadership ... you need a seasoned executive who has already earned the trust of your board, colleagues and investors.

"5. Have Supportive and Patient Executive and Investors... (be) able to move quickly and seize opportunities in the face of extreme competitive pressure."

The Customer Revolution may be far more technical, especially in the field of marketing, than Customers.com by an entire order of magnitude. That's a good-news/bad-news situation for readers. The bad news is that it assumes readers have a much higher level of business experience than the previous book. The good news is that there are a considerable number of meaty details that can be evaluated and used almost as they appear on the page.

Well considered and well written throughout, the book's major flaws are a few apparent contradictions. For example, Seybold urges using trusted leadership when making changes on the fly, but also notes that the leader be a "renegade." Some corporate renegades are leaders, but they're few and far between.

The Customer Revolution is an excellent work. The survivors of the recent shakeout continue to grow and evolve.