Diary: Book review

Barwise and Meehan's book is a back-to-basics lecture on the importance of customer service. They start by saying that it is a common current misconception that the customer is king and suggest that, too often, customers are the hapless recipients of bad service. Because of this, they argue, product differentiation is not the key issue facing marketers today. They hold that, while suppliers tweak around at the level of branding and novelty, this is less important to customers than the experience of excellent service.

In short, they argue that companies should pursue the provision of generic category benefits rather than focusing on the development of brands within categories. They believe companies should think more inside the box, focusing on service, not novelty, and deliver differentiation via service because it is this that matters most to customers.

This is fine and laudable, but hardly new, and certainly problematic.

The clue lies in the case studies used, which include Orange, One-2-One, Daewoo, and Tesco. The authors are talking to big businesses, not small concerns, and herein lies the tension.

Service is important for businesses of all sizes, but the authors fail to recognise that good service is the single most difficult element for large companies to achieve. In current conditions, with economic drivers forcing an increasing number of large organisations to outsource customer support services, it is almost impossible to generate the culture that is required to achieve a genuine connection with customers.

In contrast, when I walk into my local pub, the barman knows my name. He knows what I drink and he asks about my family. My window cleaner waves his hand when I realise I don't have enough cash to pay him that week and knows I'm good until the next time he sees me.

Large businesses face economic and cultural barriers to entry to generate excellence in service. Technology can be used to generate a degree of synthetic personalisation - the simulation of connection facilitated by something as simple as being able to pull up a screen displaying the transactions and details of any one particular customer, but technology can not work at the level of genuine intimacy.

The authors do recognise that excellence in service demands an investment in people and the development of a customer-facing culture, but again there is nothing new in their prescription of how this can be achieved. They suggest CEOs and marketers should get back to the shop floor as often as possible. They talk about getting inside competitors' minds, and focusing on employee satisfaction and empowerment.

Overall, however, it's hard to leave this book with a feeling of being really fired up about how to do something differently that you aren't at least trying to do already. Most big businesses know service matters. They either just can't afford it or can't consistently generate it when the organisation reaches a certain size. In summary, sadly, the central idea is too weak and the overall tone not engaging enough to earn this book its keep outside of a required reading list.

John Frood is strategic planning director of WWAV Rapp Collins London and strategy partner Europe at Zalpha. This book review was first published on brandrepublic.com