I am thankful for the invitation from Career Press to review Noah Fleming and Shawn Veltman’s book DEALING WITH DIFFICULT CUSTOMERS

Dealing With Difficult Customers is a book everyone can benefit from reading. Although directed toward businesses, the message of this book may be applied on a personal level. While reading Dealing With Difficult Customers, I thought not only how I could apply it to coaching businesses, but also how it could be easily adapted for in many personal coaching situations. It dawned on me that in many respects almost everyone we interact with is a customer of sorts.

Everyone has heard the horror stories of customers who were wronged or dissatisfied with dealing with companies. One of my personal favorites is dealing with my cable company. I more than fit the definition of a dissatisfied and difficult customer. I was on the phone every billing period for almost the entire year of my contract trying to straighten out billing errors. I was upset and disgruntled and seeking to ensure I was only charged the contract rates. There were two benefits to this process. One I spoke to probably 200 different customer service reps and supervisors, and I found out that almost every cable customer had the same problem. What was surprising to me is that most people with similar situations just paid what the cable company billed. To them it wasn’t worth the hassle to spend all day on the phone with only negative results, I mention this only because Dealing With Difficult Customers lit the light bulb of why cable companies treat their customers the way they do.

The other benefit I derived from my year long experience with customer service was the difference among company representatives. It was very interesting that while all the customer service reps and supervisors all gave similar responses, some were very likeable and professional while others were nasty and argumentative. I mention this only because it gave me a very good appreciation and understanding for the information presented in Dealing With Difficult Customers.

No matter your professional position or personal situation we all have to deal with difficult customers to some degree. The lessons and advice in Dealing With Difficult Customers may be adapted to any business or personal situation.

Noah Fleming and Shawn Veltman are accomplished customer relation consultants who Coach businesses on customer relations and develop tools to implement the procedures they develop. With over 15 years of working together they have become unique in the customer relation field for identifying the root customer relation problems a client has and developing a specific plan to address the problems.

Their analysis and training techniques are spot on and when employed get great results. I learned a lot about customers, and that not all customers are worth keeping. While it seems counter intuitive it is more profitable to fire some customers than work to retain them. The book explores difficult customers in depth, and explains that old slogan “The customer is always right” may not be applicable to many cases. In fact the customer is often wrong, and the authors explain the merits and methods of dealing with a difficult customer who made a mistake or is being difficult just to get their way.

A key point of the book is the importance of good customer relations. Much easier said than done, Dealing With Difficult Customers discusses the importance of developing great customer relations through data collection and analysis. Using the axiom “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” Noah and Shawn discuss and give examples of how meaningful customer relations data may be collected, analyzed, and use to implement customer relation relations policies and procedures. They even talk about the value of developing scripts and training employees how and when to use them. The one outstanding point the book develops is training frontline employees how to treat customers. They stress the golden rule of customer relations is to make each and every customer feel special.

This is a well-written and informative book full of insights and experiences that may be adapted to fit most customer relations scenarios. While focused on frontline customer service reps and management, I found all the concepts easily transfers to personal interactions.

Best of Luck

The PracticaL Mentor – www.practicalmentor.com

Title: DEALING WITH DIFFICULT CUSTOMERS

Author: Noah Fleming and Shawn Veltman

Publisher: CAREER PRESS INC, Wayne NJ

Pages: 238

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

ISBN 9781632651174

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