My parents raised me with a tenacious spirit.  For this, I am giving thanks.

Many years ago I learned an important lesson about tenacity even when all indications revealed that failure was imminent.

My first book. Published in 1992.

In 1990, when I first had the idea to write a customer service book, friends tried to discourage me by saying I’d be too late to make any significant difference.  Numerous colleagues and industry insiders warned me that customer service was a very small market and interest would be scarce if at all.

In addition there were already a few terrific customer service books published implying that customer service professionals had all the material they needed. Tom Peter’s book, In Search Of Excellence and Ron Zemke’s Service America and Knock Your Socks Off books, became customer service standards.

Still, I could not deny the tenacious drive to share my ideas.

I was looking forward, not backward.

In 1990, the word “call center” did not exist in business vocabulary. Inbound and outbound phone operations were called customer service departments, inside sales departments, boiler rooms, etc. Then computer telephony and telecommunication innovation resulted in the consolidation of numerous Inbound and outbound phone operations into call centers.

I could not have imagined the explosive growth in call centers, during the early 1990s, which placed customer service strategies in high demand and this serendipitously coincided with the publication of my first book, Customer Service Over the Phone.

It turned out that I was not late to the party – in fact, my book arrived just in time to serve a burgeoning industry.  Thanks mom and dad for teaching me to never give up.