Very insightful, with actionable steps to providing better customer service!

This is It's A Wonderful Life about customer service. Charlie, the fairy godmother, is highly endearing. Lots of great tidbits all throughout this book. Yes, the writing is simple, but I think there is a good reason for that. Customer service is the base of business - tips to get it right should be accessible to everyone. If all businesses utilize what is in this book, then there wouldn't be a need for it. I feel so excited to improve customer service/experience in my work life!!

Oh boy. I don't know why I did this to myself. I once had a boss who LOVED this book, so when I found a copy cheap I thought I'd see what the fuss is about.

This book is a mere 130 pages. Yet there is so little content that the font is large and the top and bottom margins are HUGE. This is a fast read, which is its most redeeming quality.

Yet even with the huge margins and large font, there is still so little information that it has to be given to us in this longwinded story about a fairy godmother (who is a man, since they needed to fill a gender quota - this book hasn't aged well) of customer service who loves to play golf and can read thoughts and disappear/reappear.

Spoiler: There are three points, and they are:
Decide on a vision of what you want to do.
Discover what your customers want, and how your vision can or cannot accommodate.
Deliver what you say you'll do, plus 1% more.

That's it. That's the book. If you choose to read it, you'll also read about a fictitious grocery store with valet, a department store where the boss' office is right in the middle of the store so customers can walk up and talk to him, and a few other businesses.

Perhaps the book was more revolutionary in its time. I think now businesses do understand that the bare minimum isn't enough (even though they don't all do it well).

It went fast, and now I can say I read it.

Raving Fans is popular among my upper-level managers (so much so that staff are occassionally exhorted to create "raving fans"), so I thought I'd take a look. There are some sound principles of customer service buried in this very brief book, but the parable delivery style is inane and condescending. The book design, with different amounts of text on every page, is distracting and clearly intended to turn a 50-page booklet into a 130-page hardback that can be marketed for $22. I appreciate the customer service philosophy that underlies Raving Fans, and will try to take it to heart as much as someone who isn't responsible for policy can, which I think boils down to going out of your way to solve problems whenever possible. But frankly I am not a raving fan.

I'm not even opposed to the substance of the message... it's just the frame device smacks of mediocre fiction of the 50s. Anything trying to tell me that things were so much better in some prior golden age has a hard road to walk, and this doesn't manage to get very far along it. The customer service advice seems pretty spot on; I'd just rather it be more... something.

I love the book as an approach to customer service but I feel that this book was not for me as a student