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Nancy J. Friedman (born 1939/1940) [1] is an American customer service and telephone skills consultant.[2] She is also known as her business persona the "Telephone Doctor"[2]
Nancy J. Friedman | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Customer service consultant |
| Years active | 1982–present |
| Organization | Telephone Doctor |
| Known for | Telephone skills training |
| Spouse | Dick Friedman |
| Children | David, Linda |
Nancy Friedman is founder and president of Telephone Doctor, a customer-service training company based in St. Louis, Missouri.[3][4] She also appears as spokesperson in the company's video training programs.[5] Friedman controls the registered trademark and dotcom domain for "Telephone Doctor".[5]
Friedman and her husband, Dick Friedman, were originally from Chicago.[6] Friedman has one year of college from the University of Miami.[1] Friedman worked as an actress in San Diego in the 1960s.[7] In 1964, she and her husband bought a radio station and then in 1967, they bought another radio station in St. Louis, Missouri.[1] In 1967, she and her husband moved to St. Louis.[7] In St. Louis, she did promotions for a weather-forecast service, Weatherline, which she started up with her husband in 1968.[1][6] She also continued to act, doing several shows a year and winning the Golden Globe Atlas Award for "best comedy actress."[6][8]
In 1982, after being treated rudely in a routine call to her insurance agent,[7] Friedman both canceled her policies and started the "desk drawer" one-woman business Telephone Doctor to train employees in telephone etiquette.[9][10] The insurer company asked "how it should be done" and invited Friedman to demonstrate polite customer service to its representatives, leading to Friedman providing customer-service seminars to other corporations and associations.[11][12] Friedman's first seminar earned 38 cents in profit.[9][10] "Telephone Doctor" was named by Friedman's second client, a Davenport, Iowa newspaper editor.[11][13][14]
The company, Telephone Doctor, was founded by Friedman in 1983.[1] By 1986, her business, co-owned with her husband, Dick Friedman and her son, David, was a subsidiary of Weatherline and Sportsline.[7] By 1987, she was doing three to four seminars a week.[15] She and her husband began creating training videos because she didn't have enough time to do all the seminars people were asking for.[9] By 1994, Telephone Doctor employed 23 staff members and had annual worldwide sales of $2 million.[9][10] The company moved to a new building with a theater that same year.[9] Also in 1994, the company acquired World Telecom Associates.[16]
The company also did surveys to find out what phrases frustrated callers the most.[17] Friedman tried going on television to increase her business's exposure, but later found that creating close relationships with clients worked better for her type of business.[18] In 2007, the company made $3 million.[1]
Friedman's desire to teach businesses how to make better use of the telephone rather than to take it for granted[19] has been called a "crusade" and a "quest to stamp out phone rudeness".[20] She explains that bad customer service translates into lower sales and lost business of hundreds of millions of dollars.[4][9] Friedman is a speaker at corporate seminars in the U.S,[5][19][20] She has been a keynote speaker at Fortune 500 and other corporate and association meetings.[5][11] Her practices were recommended by Bear Stearns chairman Alan C. Greenberg for implementation by all employees.[20]
- Customer Service Nightmares: 100 Tales of the Worst Experiences Possible, and how They Could Have Been Fixed (1998)
- Telephone Skills from A to Z: The Telephone Doctor Phone Book (2000)
- Telemarketing Tips from A to Z: How to Make Every Call a Winner!. Menlo, California: Crisp Publications. 2001. ISBN 978-1-56052-603-2.
- Excuses, Excuses, Excuses ... (2001)
- 50 Little Tips That Make a Big Difference. St. Louis, MO: Independent Publishing Corp. 2005. ISBN 978-1-893937-25-3.
- How to Get Your Customers Swearing By You, Not At You: Telephone Doctor's Guide to Customer Service Training. Amherst, MA: HRD Press. 2008. ISBN 978-1-59996-151-4.
- 54 Golden Nuggets: The Best of the Telephone Doctor. Amherst, MA: HRD Press, Inc. 2011. ISBN 978-1-59996-255-9.
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