William Middlebrooks recently spent an hour selecting four suits at a Birmingham men’s Store. He stood patiently for a tailor’s fitting. The salesman took his $2000 check – but left him waiting at the counter for nearly 15 minutes to get the OK to accept the check.

Hot under the collar and eager to get to his next appointment, Middlebrooks walked out. But not before lecturing the salesman on the merits of exceptional customer service. “If this was Nordstrom’s I would be treated better,” he recalls telling the salesman. “My issue is that you’ve got a check here for $2000, you’re going to keep the suits for alteration, and it’s not my responsibility to wait for a chain of authorizations.”

Customer satisfaction is the abiding passion and principal business pursuit of Middlebrooks, the managing partner of the Southfield-based consulting company Excellence In Action. Middlebrooks typically charges $35,000 to $45,000 for a six- to- eight week consulting program, and $4500 for a two-day employee training session. He serves such organizations as AT&T, the Detroit Medical Center, Henry Ford Health System, United Technologies Automotive and the City of Detroit.

The tall nattily dressed consultant quit a thriving job as a marketing manager for IBM two years ago. With a short stop in between at a technical staffing company, he opened his own company in January to help companies generate what he calls “exceptional customer service.”

Using more charts, statistics and animated one-liners than presidential candidate Ross Perot, Middlebrooks aims to put satisfaction back on track.

For his clients, he often concentrates on five attitudes to measure customer satisfaction: Reliability, assurance, responsiveness, tangibles and empathy. He measures customer reactions before and after training, promising a money-back guarantee if satisfaction levels don’t improve. “Bill helped us move form the bottom of the pack in customer rating to the top of the pack. He identified the things that could make us better,” says Tom Mohr, AT&T general manager, Michigan commercial markets.

While serving small business customers around the state with long-distance, paging and other services, Mohr said, the branch staff had been serving accounts instead of devising communications solutions to help their customers grow. Retraining the staff takes time and patience.

Middlebrooks is now doing consulting work for AT&T in Ohio and Indiana.

“Bill rated us against the expectations of our customers and our employees and identified gaps in our performance. All of us were eager to find out how we could improve. He could explain techniques in a very credible manner,” says Mohr. Mohr’s branch ranked 17th in customer satisfaction out of 27 AT&T branches before training, and shifted to second place in the next quarterly ranking.

Clients say that Middlebrooks’ professionalism is contagious. He follows up immediately on questions, clarifies key points, writes thank-you notes and provides research materials to support his suggestions. His wife, Karla Rose Middlebrooks, says his focus is the key reason his business has gotten off to a good start.

She admits she sometimes gets embarrassed when her husband lectures salespeople or waitpersons while they are out together, but she understands him. “He lives the standards he sets for himself and works diligently to meet the expectations of others,” she says.

Karla and Bill Middlebrooks both grew up on West Outer Drive, in a neighborhood populated by professionals with a passel of children. Both credit their parents with instilling positive career values. Her dad was a finance manager for Ford Motor Co., and Middlebrooks’ father was an entrepreneur who ran a group of adult foster-care homes and apartment complexes.

Surrounding them were other parents who served as role models, disciplinarians and wise counselors, depending on the need. His buddies included independent contractor Andy McLemore Jr., whose dad was builder, funeral director O’Niel Swanson, whose family runs a chain of funeral homes, and broadcaster Ed Gordon, whose father was a science teacher.

Middlebrooks took to entrepreneurship at an early age, cutting lawns, shoveling snow and doing odd jobs for spending money while attending Catholic Central High School and the University of Michigan. He dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps as and entrepreneur, but accepted a job at IBM fresh out of college in 1982.

During a six-month IBM Client Executive Program at The Harvard Business School in 1993, he locked onto the growing need for customer satisfaction training. Middlebrooks spent two years refining his business plan and saving money before plunging into self-employment. He sent copies of the plan to friends and parents of friends to get their input.

Then he sought out longtime business associate Ralph Burrell, who owns SymCon and is CEO of Alpha Capital Management Co., as 40-percent equity partner. “I wanted to partner with a successful, established, minority businessman who had similar ideas about skills and resources, and passion for excellence,” Middlebrooks says.

Despite the demands of a new business, Middlebrooks reserves time each morning to make breakfast for his sons before driving them to school. “My dad never let business intrude on raising his family, ” he says. “He was there for us. And it’s important for me to make time for my kids.”