Customer Reviews

What to Say to a Porcupine: 20 Humorous Tales That Get to the Heart of Great Customer Service

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THis is a great book on the basics of customer service. You can even read it to your children to inculcate good service behaviours from young. Different animals are featured in the 20 stories to illustrate the bad service behaviours that we tend to exhibit unconsciously and the impact from the customers' perspectives. The questions at the end of each story sets you thinking about how you can apply each service basic in your company. You can use this book to conduct small group service training.

WHAT TO SAY TO A PORCUPINE: 20 HUMOROUS TALES THAT GET TO THE HEART OF GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE is a fun, easily-read guide which uses the format of Aesop's fables to illustrate basic principles of customer service, from listening to customer needs to adjusting behaviors. The result is a light but pointed read perfect for both business and general lending libraries.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I have been a management consultant and psychologist for over 15 years. As I am constantly looking for memorable and humorous ways to help clients remember valuable psychological principles, I applaud Rich Gallagher and his porcupines.

Gallagher's fables are fun and, ahem, to the point. They are based on solid psychology and excellent common sense.

I especially appreciate Gallagher's reminder that there is not only one way to handle customer service. He notes that not everyone appreciates the nonstop 100-watt smile and an overdose of "chipper", so it pays to have different personality styles in the customer service department.

The book is thin and easy to read; Gallagher's message is worth your time.

The end of each chapter "Moral" and the questions lead to good training material. And this is a VERY, VERY easy read. If you want something a bit more technical, it isn't for you.

Perfect book to use with customer service staff. Quick read with pointed lessons on how to deliver excellent customer service.

It's easy to think we don't need one more book on "Customer Service" - yet we still get BAD customer service everywhere. Kudos to Richard Gallagher for taking a new, funny spin on this topic, thereby nudging us to give a new look at how we can give better customer service.

I especially liked the Moral and the Discussion Questions at the end of each chapter because they nail down that everyone drew the same lesson and made me think about how I would apply this information to my business, which is the point of the book in the first place.

`What to say to a Porcupine' is an invaluable resource for anyone who works with customers on a regular basis. This easy-to-read book contains a few questions at the end of each chapter to facilitate thought provoking discussions on the important role of customer service in any organization. Learning has never been so fun!

.... is to deliver the best possible product. That's where Richard Gallagher falls a little short in his book, WHAT TO SAY TO A PORCUPINE. The stories, while amusing and entertaining, I found to be a little too simplistic for the business world.

I did break down one story, which happend to be the namesake of the book, into a script for a recent meeting. I've had great luck in the past with business parables used in meetings as training tools and they really work well to engage everyone. But these stories are just too basic for that purpose and most of them only have two or three characters, so they don't work particularly well for group training and involvement.

With that said, I want to add this IS worth reading. It is a good training tool for readers who need a little "entertainment" as they expand their minds. The lessons taught are sound and Gallagher does a good job of summarizing the lesson and gives some good discussion questions to reflect upon.

For me, the best section of the book was the epilog. Here Gallagher ties everything together nicely and gives some solid customer service training. In the future I may use some of these parables in their story form as a presentation, but for a group re-enactment, they do not function well.