This book explores the basic tenets of service excellence, opening to distinguish customer service from service excellence, and explore the driving aspects of strategy and philosophy. The brand promise to customers creates expectations; hooks targeted and segmented customers into a relationship. Service operations deliver expectations, delight, or on occasion, disappointment, and marketing responds to create loyalty, further delight, or recover the relationship. Freshness of product or service offering, the injection of a characterful sense of fun, and sensitive personalization of service combine to deliver an authentic, pleasurable and memorable service experience prompting much sought loyalty and advocacy. In turn, staff are happy, profits rise and the organization has longterm sustainability. The first volume offers some theoretical background, while the second suggests mechanisms, tools, and techniques to help embed to excellence as the foundation of value that the organization delivers. Both contain practical examples and a self-assessment diagnostic tool to identify organizational areas of strength, and aspects to improve.

Today's customers are demanding service that is faster, better, and more personalized than ever before. How can organizations ensure that they are prepared to meet that challenge? The latest addition to the best-selling "Knock Your Socks Off Service(R)" series, "101 Activities for Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service" provides readers with the practical tools and cost-effective training required to help meet their customers' needs. Taking the unique position of seeing things from the customer's perspective, this collection of fun and enlightening exercises teaches customer service managers and employees valuable ways to help their organizations provide world-class service, and helps them create an action plan for improvement. Written in the same accessible and humorous style that made "Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service" so popular, this companion guide covers such topics as: - how to say no - empathy vs. sympathy - service recovery - listening - email - telephone skills - customers from hell - winning words and soothing phrases - anticipating customer needs - building reliability - customer feedback - keeping a stress log - and more These simple but effective activities take only minutes, but deliver truly powerful, lasting results.

Discover the hidden ways to raise your organizations' customer service experiences from ordinary to extraordinary. If you want to know how strong your company's customer service is, ask your employees to describe what their work entails. Then pay attention to whether they simply list their duties and tasks or if they speak to the true essence of their job--to create delighted customers who will be less price sensitive, have higher repurchase rates, and enthusiastically recommend the company or brand to others. The latter should be every employee's highest priority, because when it's not, your customers are merely the recipients of a transaction, not an experience, and transactions do not make for a lasting impression or inspire loyalty. In Delight Your Customers, customer service expert Steve Curtin makes a compelling case that customer service managers need to shift from monitoring service activities to modeling, recognizing, and reinforcing the behaviors that create happy and returning customers. Things such as: Expressing genuine interest Offering sincere compliments Sharing unique knowledge Conveying authentic enthusiasm Providing pleasant surprises Delivering service heroics when needed Simply based on their own personal experiences, everyone knows that great customer service is rare. So why wouldn't you want to provide a unique, caring, and beneficial experience for all your customers to rave about with others? With the real-world stories, examples, and strategies shared in Delight Your Customers, you can take the customer service experience you offer from ordinary to extraordinary.

This invaluable resource is the training manual you need to give your employees the thorough training, review, and--if necessary--overhaul they need in the vitally important area of customer service. If their interactions with you and your employees were the only things your customers knew about your business, what would they say about it? Would they use descriptions such as "uninformed," "rude," "hot-tempered," "uncaring"? For your customer, nothing else represents your business more than your employees; therefore, nothing is more important than arming them with the knowledge and skills they need to find the best solution for every customer. Using scenarios, guidelines, and practice exercises, Customer Service Training 101 will train them in: Creating positive first impressions Speaking and writing effectively Listening attentively Identifying needs Making customers feel valued Confidently handling customer complaints Your business plan is sound. Your product is needed. Your growth strategies are ground-breaking, but poor customer service can bring it all to a crashing halt. Equip you and your employees with the necessary skills before it's too late.

"I highly recommend reading this book " -Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com

Lots of businesses are respected, but only an elite few have passionate, loyal, vocal fans. The kind of customers who not only come back time and time again, but rave to friends, family, and even strangers. The kind who can drive explosive growth via e-mail, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Jeanne Bliss is an expert on what it takes to earn that kind of customer.

Bliss has studied and worked with many beloved companies, from longtime successes like Wegmans and Harley-Davidson to relatively new companies like Zappos and The Container Store. They all make the same five fundamental choices. Their reward: an army of fans who say things like, "I'd marry them if I could," and "I love you more than my dog "

The breakthrough selling method that converts leads into customers, customers into repeat customers, and repeat customers into lifelong relationships

Salespeople too often approach selling as a transaction instead of a relationship--going in with the intention to sell rather than to build a relationship. Use the lessons in "Contagious Selling" to put relationships first--and sales will inevitably follow.

"Contagious Selling" provides the tools for captivating even the toughest customers and then cultivating genuine relationships through the power of being contagious. A leading expert on persuading and motivating others, David Rich presents his powerful new method for attracting, connecting with, and maintaining buyers. Inside, he teaches you how to Get prospects to feel as if they've known you their whole lives Use voice modulation and body language to instantly connect with anybody Sell yourself without sounding self-serving Manage the transition from captivation to cultivation Make your customers "competition proof"