Nancy Friedman

Nancy J. Friedman (born 1939/1940)

Nancy Friedman is founder and president of Telephone Doctor, a customer-service training company based in St. Louis, Missouri. She also appears as spokesperson in the company's video training programs. Friedman controls the registered trademark and dotcom domain for "Telephone Doctor". Friedman has one year of college from the University of Miami.

Career

In 1982, after being treated rudely in a routine call to her insurance agent, Friedman's first seminar earned 38 cents in profit. "Telephone Doctor" was named by Friedman's second client, a Davenport, Iowa newspaper editor.

The company, Telephone Doctor, was founded by Friedman in 1983. By 1987, she was doing three to four seminars a week. She and her husband began creating training videos because she didn't have enough time to do all the seminars people were asking for.

The company also did surveys to find out what phrases frustrated callers the most. 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. In 2007, the company made $3 million.

Friedman's desire to teach businesses how to make better use of the telephone rather than to take it for granted has been called a "crusade" and a "quest to stamp out phone rudeness". She explains that bad customer service translates into lower sales and lost business of hundreds of millions of dollars. Friedman is a speaker at corporate seminars in the U.S, She has been a keynote speaker at Fortune 500 and other corporate and association meetings. Her practices were recommended by Bear Stearns chairman Alan C. Greenberg for implementation by all employees.

Books 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)

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses ... (2001)