Bill Price
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Bill Price

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I started my career, after Stanford Business School, with McKinsey & Company in San Francisco and Stockholm, working closely with Tom Peters and Bob Waterman as they penned "In Search of Excellence". One of its "Eight Basics" has stayed with me ever since -- Close to the Customer -- and you can see flavors of it in both of my books. After McKinsey I wanted to get as far from management consulting as possible so I luckily became CFO for a software start-up in San Francisco, helping the founder/CEO to convince MCI Telecommunications to buy us in 1991. For the rest of the 90s I built that concept into the $700 million MCI Call Center Services division with a wide range of business customers including ADP, Citibank, and Microsoft MSN. Once WorldCom scooped up MCI many of us could see the writing on the wall, so I sought VC backing to carve out some of Call Center Services but listened to the siren call of Amazon, in my hometown of Seattle, and in early 1999 came onboard as the company's 1st Global VP of Customer Service. Until I got there the customer service ops, like other teams at Amazon, succeeded because of brute force and passion; I took on the task to insert process, and as they say "the rest is history": #1 in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, NPS 60 or higher, and a reduced need to contact Amazon for support -- what I called "the best service is no service". I left Amazon on September 1st, 2001 to resume my start-up pursuits but 10 days later that shriveled up, sadly for all of us, and so I started a new career building a customer service/experience consulting firm Driva Solutions ("driva" is Swedish for "to propel, to drive forward"), a 10-country partnership with like-minded industry veterans called LimeBridge, and two best-practice sharing groups (Global Operations Council and Chief Customer Officer Forum, Americas). Along the way my LimeBridge partners encouraged me to chronicle what my team and I did at Amazon, especially David Jaffe in Australia, since they had all seen significant success with "best service" with their clients. This wound up becoming "The Best Service is No Service: Liberating Your Customers From Customer Service, Keep Them Happy and Control Costs" (Wiley 2008), but it covers many companies besides Amazon and has become very popular. David and I wondered if there was a need for "book 2" and clients told us "yes!", so we took the final chapter of "Best Service" and conducted original research that told us that the customer experience leaders operate fundamentally differently from other organizations; they don't apply "B2B" or "B2C" or "CRM" approaches that are company-outward but, instead, what we are now calling "Me2B", embracing that the customer is in charge, now more than ever! We broke down our research into 7 Customer Needs and 40 Sub-Needs, each with bad stories and a slew of good stories. We also discovered that Me2B also applies to these organizations' employees. This evolved into "Your Customer Rules! Delivering the Me2B Experiences That Today's Customers Demand" (Wiley 2015). Keeping to our 7-year cycle, David and I got back together to research how some organizations are able to make everything easy for their customers (one of the 7 Customer Needs from our "Me2B" book) and strive for our "no service" objectives. We divided them into three groups (Innovators including digital natives like Airbnb, N26, and Xero; Renovators including global players like Blizzard Entertainment, United Airlines, and Vodafone; and Responsive Agencies such as Australia Tax Office and the country of Estonia). After interviewing these and other organizations, we developed a 9-part program to become "frictionless" from product design through all support needs, now featured in "The Frictionless Organization: Deliver Great Customer Experiences with Less Effort" (Berrett-Kohler, 2022).
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