The Spirit of Hospitality takes readers on a journey of passion for purpose that empowers the missing ingredients of hospitality into a proven leadership style that works. Time has sped up to the point where technology has surpassed the last few thousand years by only a generation. What happened to kindness, humility and the human touch vs. having our face buried into a laptop or IPhone? A life dedicated to excellence does not come by chance, or with age, but by choice and commitment. Larry Stuart strives to give The Spirit of Hospitality to others who are called to a life of prosperity and significance. He provides the tools, attributes and real-life examples of what works when it comes to serving up a memorable guest service delivery and describes the necessary ingredients of hospitality. There is hope only if individuals bring back the missing ingredients of kindness, humility, integrity, encouragement, generosity, team and accountability. Only then is the spirit of hospitality empowered to provide the right leadership approach in building relationships to a new level of expectation, and allows those who embrace that spirit to accomplish whatever they strive to achieve.

Exceptional customer service is crucial to a successful phone-based business. Quality service can secure customer loyalty, while poor service can lose it. This concise guide examines every important scenario that a customer service representative is likely to encounter and shows how to best handle each situation. It also explains how to make effective use of voice mail, email, fax, and letters. ;

Get the most out of ACDs (automatic call distributors) and other complex systems in order to boost customer satisfaction and increase sales Includes three ready to use RFPs (request for proposals) for buying an ACD, computer telephony system, or recording

Bridget Brennan, CEO of Female Factor, shows readers how to beat competitors and grow overall market share by applying the fundamentals of creating a customer experience that appeals to the most powerful consumer decision makers: women. When people think about the world's growth markets, they often envision countries like China and India. Yet they miss the largest one right here at home: women. With women driving 70 to 80 percent of consumer purchasing, it would seem an obvious strategy to learn how best to appeal to this continually expanding market. Common sense? Yes. Common practice? No. In Winning Her Business, Bridget Brennan, advisor to some of the world's biggest brands and businesses, provides a roadmap for selling in a world dominated by the rise of women's economic power. She points out how classic sales practices that focused on simply offering product knowledge are no longer enough in today's Google-informed world. Instead, savvy business people must adapt by learning how to deliver transformational customer experiences that speak to women, and by developing stronger interpersonal skills, value-added knowledge, and emotional-engagement techniques that inspire sales, referrals, and repeat business. Bolstered by a dozen years of research, Brennan offers invaluable insight into women as consumers and shows readers how, at the end of the day, mastering an inclusive customer experience is something everyone appreciates.

Leading the Customer Experience explores the relationship between leadership behaviour and exceptional service. Most organisation's strategic aims and goals centre on the delivery of excellent service. Loyal customers not only keep buying from a company but also recommend the business to others. It is clear that managers and leaders throughout an organisation have a key influence on the experience that customers receive. How leaders behave has a direct impact on their team member's motivation to go the extra mile to deliver excellent service for the customer. Sarah Cook's vision for Leading the Customer Experience is to provide practical advice, tools and techniques for managers in how to effectively lead and motivate their team to deliver the best possible customer service. This book encapsulates her research on the behaviours of leaders who successfully create an environment where employees deliver exceptional service and she brings a pragmatic and business focused approach to the topic. Each chapter contains a variety of case study examples from businesses in UK and Europe, Asia Pacific, US and BRIC countries. These include service organisations in the financial sector, manufacturing, hospitality, transport, healthcare, public and third sectors.

Intended for advanced students and practitioners this book gives an up-to-date presentation of property management as practised by a leading company, BAA plc. A key aim of the book is to show the benefits to be obtained from building a business culture based on service to the customer. This may be achieved by due attention to communication, leadership, measurement, benchmarking and accountability.

In Raving Patients, Dr. Len Tau, a practicing dentist in Philadelphia and online reputation specialist, shares simple tips and best practices to become visible and demonstrate credibility online. Dental practices waste thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours trying to find new patients using methods that may have worked decades ago but no longer work today. Raving Patients teaches dentists how to get exponentially better marketing results for a fraction of the time and money using a simple combination of online and offline reputation marketing strategies that take only minutes to implement. The strategies within Raving Patients help dental practices rise up search engine results when patients in their area search for new dentists. Dr. Tau also presents proven methodologies that help dental practices stand out as the practice of choice in their area. This generates a steady flow of patients who are more likely to move forward with treatment recommendations than other dental marketing strategies.

Land your next customer with total confidence you'll keep them for the long-term. Keep Your Customers shares a fresh perspective on the old problem of customer relations. Ali Cudby shares with business leaders how to set up customer engagement for loyalty with a company culture to support it. Keep Your Customers provides from real-world consumer behavior stories, business best practices and CEO-led case studies featuring industries ranging from technology (ClusterTruck, PERQ), consumer packaged goods (Soapbox) and retail (Esprit de la Femme, Urban Stems). Interviews with renown venture capitalists Mark Suster and Kara Nortman of Upfront Ventures, Square Capital executive Jackie Reses, and indie music Shudder To Think's frontman Craig Wedren are also featured. Forward by Springboard Enterprises Founder Kay Koplovitz. Keep Your Customers is ideal for business leaders who want to grow without being stuck in the endless grind of new customer acquisition. It shares the strategies and tactics that boost long-term customer value. Who can benefit from reading Keep Your Customers? Business Leaders interested in tying consumer behavior to customer retention through brand loyalty. Entrepreneurs looking to crack the customer relations mystery wide open while they grow their business - not losing clients. Managers and leaders at all levels in all industries who want to improve communication skills across their teams while massively improving the overall customer experience in ways that actually make a difference.

THE RIGHT PHRASE FOR EVERY SITUATION . . . EVERY TIME

You've heard it a million times: "The customer is always right." But let's face it--sometimes the customer is misinformed, confused, or downright difficult. The ability to handle such customers is what separates the serious professional from the average employee.

"Perfect Phrases for Customer Service," second edition, provides the language you need for everyday customer service situations--and includes simple, effective techniques that can help you meet even the most demanding customer needs. Master the most effective words and phrases for: Defusing bad situations before they get worse Handling complaints patiently and professionally Satisfying customers and increasing sales Building long-term relationships with important customers

A customer-centric culture provides focus and direction for the organization, ensuring that exceptional value will be offered to customers this, in turn, results in enhanced market performance. Unfortunately, caught up in the daily economic and competitive pressures of running complex and fast-changing businesses, managers may lose sight of customers desires. And, consequently, customer experiences often fall far short of expectations.

Written by an expert with more than fifteen years of experience, Superior Customer Value: Strategies for Winning and Retaining Customers, Third Edition benchmarks the best companies and shows you what it truly means to create world-class value for customers. The book is a state-of-the-art guide to designing, implementing, and evaluating a customer value strategy in service, technology, and information-based organizations. It explores key marketing planning issues that emphasize relationship management strategies to keep customers happy.

See What s New in the Third Edition:

New topics include:

• Business models
• Co-creation of value
• Corporate entrepreneurship
• Customer experience management
• Customer value metrics
• Net promoter score
• Image
• Innovation
• Social media

Expanded coverage of:

• Customer relationship management
• E-business opportunities

Written as an academic textbook for use in MBA programs, the book is highly readable, practical, and action-oriented, giving managers at all levels of experience guidance on how to improve marketing operations and create customer-centric organizations. It explains valuable tools such as customer value funnel, customer value assessment, service-quality-image-price (SQIP) analysis, and CRM models. Each chapter has a customer value insight checklist, action items, and informative figures and tables.

This revised edition addresses current trends in value-adding business practice, from understanding how to drive a market and find new ventures to the rise in customer importance of the online arena and new models and metrics for customer loyalty and retention. Great companies amaze and delight customers Superior Customer Value offers a strategic blueprint to learn from the market leaders and apply those lessons to your organization. Art Weinstein discusses the book in several videos on the CRC Press YouTube Channel.

If you don't offer great customer experience, your main competitors will take away 50% of your business. Period. Gone are the days in which businesses could simply offer an "OK" experience and get away with it. In today's hypercompetitive environment, companies can no longer be just B2C or B2B. They must become B2Me - more personal, more relevant. With customers having higher expectations and access to more information than ever before, companies must create stellar, frictionless, personalized, and memorable customer experiences, if they plan to stay in the game. In this book, you will learn: * What customer experience truly is. * How emotions can increase customer loyalty...or make customers ditch a brand. * Which behaviors and attitudes lose customers. * Ten easy, practical, and proven ways to immediately improve your customer experience. * What renowned companies do to offer the best customer experience. This book is for anyone who works serving customers in a B2C company or other businesses in a B2B environment. Everyone has an important role to play in creating a good customer experience, whether it be managers, associates, sales reps, marketing professionals, web strategists, accountants, customer service reps, delivery people, or installers. No matter what role you play, this book offers easy tips, recommendations, and examples to help improve customer experience, realistically, sustainably, and affordably.

This thesis addresses the issue of customer complaints in the context of Customer Relationship Management (CRM).After acomprehensive survey of the current literature on CRM, the thesis describes the development of a new intelligent CRM (I-CRM) framework, which integratestext analytics, type mapping, SPSS, structural equation modeling, and linear and fuzzy approaches. This new methodology, in contrast to previous ones, is able to handlecustomer complaints with respect to different variables, thus allowing organizations to find their key customers and key complaints, and to address and provide solution to the major complaints of the key customers, hence promoting business development. The thesis also describes the successful application of the method to a real-world case, represented by the immeasurable truck drivers complaints at the Fremantle port inWestern Australia.

"

The field of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has broadened greatly in recent years as technological applications have expanded. Successful Customer Relationship Management Programs and Technologies: Issues and Trends offers the latest research and developments for researchers, practitioners, and academics alike. This volume contains case studies, methodologies, frameworks, and architectures, and generally the cutting edge in research within the field of customer relationship management. In order to stay abreast of the latest updates in the field, a volume like this serves as a reference book and handbook for semantics and follow-through for managers and decision-makers.

Concise, realistic and very readable, this book is packed with insightful thinking for service excellence"

Alan Parker

Chief Executive Officer

Whitbread Group

"'Brilliantly simple premise - that a winning service approach lies in a 'rising upward trajectory' culminating in a brilliant finish - dissected into eight very practical steps that anyone can use. As the owner of a service brand myself, I'll be starting on Monday.'"

Adam Morgan, Founder, eatbigfish

"'""Rich with practical, real life solutions'."" "

Dean Finch

Group Chief Executive

National Express

"'A thought provoking practical "drama" for anyone who is passionate about excelling at customer service and driving business performance.'"
Mike Holliday-Williams
Managing Director
RSA UK Personal Insurance

"'An excellent primer about how to improve services for the public.'"
Dame Sally C Davies
Director General of Research and Development
Department of Health

To win and keep customers you have to do more than just meet their expectations - you have to surpass them. "The Finishing Touch "will show you how to make a good customer experience great by building up to an impressive finish that every customer will remember. Using real-life examples, practical advice and tailored information for your industry at the end of each chapter, Tony Cram will show you how to make your customers feel positive about your business, bring them back to buy more and inspire them to promote your business to others.

Deliver amazing service that will get your business noticed and make sure your customers come back from more

"Th""e ""Finishing Touch"will show you how to:

• Make an excellent first impression
• Manage customer expectations
• Build a trusting relationship with your customers
• Handle queues and bad news
• Make every customer feel valued
• Generate long-term interest through innovation
• Recover from mistakes
• Leave your customers wanting more so they come back time and time again.

About the author

Tony Cram has presented on competitive marketing and innovation at conferences and company conventions around the world including Berlin, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Gothenburg, Istanbul, London, Paris and Warsaw.

As a Programme Director at Ashridge Business School - one of Europe's leading centres for Management Development - he designs and delivers executive development programmes on business strategy and market innovation. His particular interest is in understanding customer value, developing brands and the dynamics of long-term business relationships.

Tony Cram's previous books include - "Customers that Count: How to build living relationships with your most valuable customers, ""Smarter Pricing: How to capture more value in your market" and "The Power of Relationship Marketing."

Overall WINNER - CMI Management Book of the Year 2014

WINNER - Innovation & Entrpreneurship Category at the CMI Awards 2014

Create a great customer experience whoever you are.

Customers are powerful. They have a loud voice, a wealth of choice and their expectations are higher than ever.

This book covers ten principles you can use to make real world improvements to your customers' experiences, whatever your business does and whoever you are.

For managers, leaders and those starting a new business, the book shows that making improvements customers will appreciate doesn't need to be complicated or cost a fortune.

Combining the latest branding research with a diverse range of powerful case examples, this book reveals the cutting edge techniques of value co-creation, personalisation and customer engagement employed by sport's leading brands. Based on the transferable lessons that emanate from these practices, Brand Fans explores and illuminates how firms can cultivate connected fans and lifelong advocates, while building brand equity exponentially in the process. This is a book that will appeal to scholars and practitioners alike, as well as anyone fascinated by modern marketing, consumer relationships and branding.

Creating a unique value for your customers is crucial if you want to differentiate in an overcrowded market. To do so, you need to define a powerful strategy that determines consistent action across your organisation to deliver your unique flavour. Szostek describes this strategy as umami, which is the fifth category of taste (besides sweet, sour, salt and bitter), and gives an exceptional flavour to your food. How do you build a powerful yet actionable strategy, and successfully implement it across your organisation? Many leaders, marketers and designers try to answer these questions. The Umami Strategy proposes a novel approach that will help you build and execute an experience strategy. The model used in the book allows you to (a) find out what stories your customers are telling today; (b) uncover motivators and demotivators that guide these stories; (c) envision the ideal future experience you want to deliver; (d) define the actionable measures that will ensure progress toward that vision; and (e) evaluate that progress through future customer stories. Enjoyable, practical and full of hidden gems and tips, this book will help you get your organisation to align with building a unique market value through delivering memorable experiences to your customers. Because to be noticed, you need to stand out of the crowd.

Despite the pressure for local councils to follow the lead of the private sector and develop shared service and partnership arrangements, the barriers in terms of culture, differences in priorities across councils and lack of experience are formidable - yet this is the most likely source of meeting government targets for reduced overheads and improved organizational effectiveness. By using extensive case studies drawn from across local councils in England, Ray Tomkinson explains the implications of sharing service delivery, addresses concerns about loss of control and accountability, and demonstrates the potential advantages. He shows how to set up collaborative ventures, formal partnerships, shared service centres or special purpose vehicles, while pointing out possible pitfalls, thus enabling senior managers to follow all the necessary project steps to create an appropriate shared service. It seeks to examine the evidence of the cost, effectiveness and quality improvements achieved from sharings. This ground-breaking book has been written for everyone in local government; it explores the political and cultural barriers, and legislative/legal framework for joint workings, explains how to find an appropriate governance vehicle, and how to gain the commitment of partners. It deals with political and managerial concerns, risk aversion and parochial issues, and the possible impact on the reputation and performance of both sharers. Shared Services in Local Government is the only comprehensive study for the UK and it will ensure any public sector organization pursuing this route is able to approach the task of creating a shared service with a real understanding of the issues involved.

The future of work is already here. Customers are adopting disruptive technologies faster than your company can adapt. When your customers are delighted, they can amplify your message in ways that were never before possible. But when your company's performance runs short of what you've promised, customers can seize control of your brand message, spreading their disappointment and frustration faster than you can keep up. To keep pace with today's connected customers, your company must become a connected company. That means deeply engaging with workers, partners, and customers, changing how work is done, how you measure success, and how performance is rewarded. It requires a new way of thinking about your company: less like a machine to be controlled, and more like a complex, dynamic system that can learn and adapt over time. Connected companies have the advantage, because they learn and move faster than their competitors. While others work in isolation, they link into rich networks of possibility and expand their influence. Connected companies around the world are aggressively acquiring customers and disrupting the competition. In The Connected Company, we examine what they're doing, how they're doing it, and why it works. And we show you how your company can use the same principles to adapt - and thrive - in today's ever-changing global marketplace.

Customer satisfaction and loyalty are becoming increasingly important to most organizations since the financial benefits from improving them have been well documented. This book presents a thorough examination of how to use research to understand customer satisfaction and loyalty. It takes the reader step-by-step through the process of designing and conducting a survey to generate accurate measures of customer satisfaction and loyalty. The research process is explained in detail, including questionnaire design, analysis and reporting, but the book also covers other elements of an effective customer satisfaction process. These include project planning, communicating with customers before, during and after the survey, as well as providing internal feedback and taking effective action to address issues raised by the survey. There is also comprehensive coverage of loyalty measurement methodologies as well as the satisfaction-profit chain and associated modelling and forecasting techniques.