Posted by ★☆☆☆☆
Cross-posted on my Goodreads account.
This is a ridiculously bad book on multiple levels. I am shocked by the high reviews. If I were teaching business people to think critically about what they read, I would use this book as an example of bad thinking. Page after page, the author draws conclusions that do not logically follow from the data he presents.
The author’s contention is that technology fails to build relationships and that companies need more people to do that. Chapter after chapter he complains about poor customer experiences without offering any data to support his contention that this is because companies are augmenting their customer experience (from buying to receiving support) with technology. His answer is more people, people who are trained to hold hands with the customer.
Yet, as I noted above, he has no data to support his entire thesis. I think he had a bad call with his cable company and decided to write the book. Look, we all know what getting lost in a bad phone system looks like or being on hold for hours looks like. We know examples where technology does not help. But the survey data is clear: Customers want tech touch. They just want it to work. Customers don’t want companies falling all over themselves to deliver exemplary service. They just want to receive what they’ve been promised.
Let’s walk through a few quotes from the book to prove my point about how badly written it is:
In other words, the customer service revolution is about having a fanatical obsession to deliver the best possible customer experience, making it your single biggest competitive advantage.
This is a central assertion for which DiJulius presents only anecdotal evidence. There is actually research he could have found and presented to support this thesis if he had tried even a little. His thesis also directly contradicts research by Gartner that shows that what customers want is for us to deliver what we promised and that delivering “the best possible customer experience” costs more and does not deliver better customer loyalty than delivering what we promise.
Businesses have created this situation for themselves by not focusing on the customer experience, not making it a priority, and not training customer-facing employees how to connect with customers. Yes, this is a crisis; but it’s also a potential turning point: Organizations and professionals can complain, or they can adapt to what the future holds.
This is a powerful statement. It’s a CRISIS, the author claims. Yet he presents not one shred of evidence. No churn numbers. No customer satisfaction surveys. We have to adapt because DiJulius pulled the fire alarm.
And then he goes on to actually contradict his entire thesis:
In a world where the answer to almost any question is at our fingertips, where AI is becoming a part of everyday life, and where we can get a week’s worth of groceries delivered to our homes in less than an hour, consumers and business buyers have come to expect highly contextual and personalized experiences,” noted the authors of the paper.
Yes! AI is actually driving personalized experiences! He contradicts his entire thesis that technology is failing us and that we need people to deliver personalized experiences.
In yet another chapter, DiJulius opines:
“Where I see a massive advantage for brick and mortar stores is in the basic human need to interact with another human. This won’t happen on Amazon, even with Alexa. Store team members can create a positive interpersonal experience that can’t EVER be created online. This is one key advantage over Amazon and other online retailers, which needs to be exploited to its utmost.
And yet brick and mortar is dying! Sales survey after sales survey says that consumers would rather learn about a product and purchase a product using technology. The brick and mortar chains that survive will be the ones connected to supply chains by technology and connected to customers by technology. That connection to their customers via technology will be precisely to create a personalized experience that gets them into the store to experience something they cannot experience online!
This book defies reality. It is torturously bad. Mr DiJulius does not understand technology, technology trends, or what B2C and B2B customers want. He has seen a real problem (that technology can be frustrating and even dehumanizing) but advocates an illogical solution (that we abandon technology in favor of human interactions) that is neither what people really want, what is actually effective, or in the realm of possibly happening. If you follow this book, your costs for interacting with customers will increase and your ability to sell and provide service to your customers will be limited to what humans can provide while your competitors augment and enhance the value of human interaction with technology.