Author: Paul Spiegelman
Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group – 214 pages
Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram
Paul Spiegelman is the co-founder (with his two brothers) and chief executive officer of the 26-year-old Beryl Companies, a healthcare firm headquartered in Bedford, Texas whose core business is providing outstanding outsourced customer service to some 500 hospitals throughout the United States.
He writes that customers are willing to pay premium prices (as evidenced by Beryl’s long-term, double-digit revenue growth) for quality customer service, which has increasingly become a commodity available from call centers located outside the United States.
This is an employee-centric company with a culture based on Paul Spiegelman’s philosophy and proven business model that employee loyalty drives customer satisfaction, which in turn drives profit. It has five to six times the profitability of its competitors and an amazing client-retention rate of 96 percent.
He owes the success of a people-oriented culture at Beryl on the company’s Circle of Growth philosophy: employee loyalty driving customer satisfaction, which in turns drives profit. Customer satisfaction is achieved by providing ethical, caring, and concerned service – key values that produce smiles on the faces of customers.
Here is substantive proof that return on investment is tied directly to the quality and level of customer service provided by a company’s employees:
In the 2007 book Firms of Endearment, author David Wolfe writes that a number of companies that put the employees and customers in front of other stakeholders returned more than ten times their investment to stock owners within ten years.
Among those firms were Harley-Davidson, Southwest Airlines, The Container Store and Whole Foods, whose stock prices rose an average 1,026 percent in the 10-year period ending in June 2006.
As comparisons during the same period, the companies looked at in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great had an average return of 333 percent and the members of the S&P 500 returned 122 percent.
Paul caught the attention of media and the business world in 2007 with the publication of his first book Why is Everyone Smiling, which was based on simple truths: customers are the basic foundation of a company (and the reason for its being) and that the type of service they receive from your company’s team determines the level of your company’s success or failure. Understanding, embracing, and practicing this thinking by everyone in a company is essential to retaining customers, and ensuring a company’s long-term growth and profitability
Presenting an example of how loyal and happy employees can work together is the book itself: Smile Guide, a collection of thoughts written collaboratively by 24 employees working at Beryl Companies. Their comments are an excellent source of information and insight for CEOs and managers to transform their own firms into productive, harmonious places to work wherein employees are united by common values and focused on common financial goals.
The topics covered in the 11 chapters in Smile Guide range from “Evolving a Culture” (chapter 1, which emphasizes that this is a slow but essential process) to “Caring a Recognition” (of team members, in chapter 6) to the “Beryl Experience” (what exactly it is, in chapter 11).
In other chapters, you learn what is the best way to recruit the talent you need for your company; why learning and growth are related; why communication is essential; how to incorporate the ‘mechanics of fun’ in your company culture; how to reach out to the communities you serve and in the process develop a good image for your firm; how to develop leaders within your company; what is branding all about; and how to tackle challenges that every company faces from time to time.
At the end, be sure to read about the contributors and why they feel about Beryl the way they feel; and about the author and his convictions, ideas and successes on constantly improving the customer experience. This is an outstanding book for managers and team members, as well as consumers to read.
Customer service has become increasingly impersonal, distant and detached, these days. Paul Spiegelman has performed a valuable service to change that, with this wonderful, and useful book. He has demonstrated that it can certainly be done, by building an outstanding customer-focused team at Beryl Companies.
