Verghis Book Review

The Ultimate Customer Support Executive by Phil Verghis (2006 - Silicon Press) Reviewed by Carl Fink Imagine that you have no customer support experience and you are suddenly assigned to manage your company’s call center…in Bangalore. What one book should you read on the plane on the way to your new assignment? Or you’re stuck in a tiny cubicle on the help desk and there’s only room for one book on the shelf. What should you put there to show your boss that you’re interested in moving to management? In both scenarios, Phil Verghis’ first effort, “The Ultimate Customer Service Executive” would fit the bill. Verghis is now a consultant but it is his real-world experience at academic help desks and at Akamai Technologies that is the source for the book's most interesting material and much of the author’s credibility. He also served as chairperson of HDI’s Strategic Advisory Board, giving him exposure to other thought leaders and the opportunity to ponder the future of the support industry. A chapter near the end of the book gives a brief introduction to scenario planning and has Mr. Verghis bravely looking into his crystal ball. I say "bravely" because two of the technologies that he mentions by name, RFID and WiMax, were red hot when the book was being written but have since experienced some setbacks in the marketplace. The author avoids the repetition that plagues many business books (keeping his tome to a very manageable 174 pages) while providing an introduction to a full range of topics of concern to customer service managers, from leadership and people skills to technology and process. Although there’s a slight tilt toward external customer service, much of the content works for internal help desks too. The topic of offshoring rates its own chapter. I’d refer you to Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” for the big picture on offshoring and its broader impact on society. (Even the omniscient Alan Greenspan cites Friedman as a source in his recent biography.) Nevertheless, Verghis provides a useful checklist of the issues that companies face in offshoring the support center and some best practices for avoiding the pitfalls. You might expect a consultant to rhapsodize on the benefits of metrics. Yet the author starts his discussion of the topic this way: “Frankly, most support metrics are useless to the rest of your company, and certainly to its top executives.” Verghis touts the Balanced Scorecard as a way to “…focus on those key metrics that are relevant to the entire business, not just those that are relevant to your part of it.” As much as I agree with all of this, I would have liked to see at least an appendix on metrics with links to more comprehensive sources. There is an interesting reference to “deflection”, a measure of contacts to the support center that are avoided by providing a truly useful self-help facility. The book is generally well researched (although an incidental reference to GE’s famous management development center places it in Groton, CT rather than Crotonville, NY) and the author has included a helpful appendix on standards relevant to the support center such as ISO 9000, BS 15000 and CoBIT. (The corresponding URLs are found in the endnotes.) If you'd like to review a book on a help desk related topic please contact an HDI officer. NE-HDI Home Page Underwritten by GroupSoft Systems, Inc. N.E. Chapter - HDI is solely responsible for the content of this site.