First impressions are often lasting impressions. How customers are treated on the phone can quickly turn them into either an ex-customer or a customer for life. This thorough, quick-reading guide shows anyone who uses the phone -- from salesperson to manager to secretary -- how to treat it as a service tool that directly impacts on company profits. Readers will be able to double their effectiveness when they learn how to: * handle irate customers * end those ""endless"" calls * take meaningful messages * handle conference calls and transfer calls * screen calls and ask focused questions * use the phone during emergencies * improve their voice effectiveness With worksheets, checklists, and fill-in forms, this desktop primer will inspire fabulous phone service.

"Cancelled flights, damaged goods, botched bills, locked-up software--these are the service screw-ups that leave customers angry, disgusted...and determined to never buy from you again! But these mad-as-hell customers can be wooed back through skillful, planned ""service recovery."" And, surprisingly, customers who experience world-class Knock Your Socks Off service recovery become your most loyal customers--and are a source of continuing business for years to come. Building on the popular, breezy approach of the Knock Your Socks Off Service series, the authors provide managers with an upbeat primer on creating a first-class recovery system. Enlivened by John Bush's witty illustrations, the book explains: * The economics of recovery--what it costs when you lose customers, and how little it can cost to win them back * The processes, policies, and technology a company must have to ensure an effective, real-time recovery system * The manager's role in sustaining an outstanding recovery system--through training, coaching, empowering, supporting, inspiring, and rewarding great service providers."

"To get a competitive edge in a world of commoditized service, companies have to convert their reactive, cost-oriented contact centers into predictive, engaged, revenue-generating, real-time profit centers. A real-time contact center provides an outstanding customer experience, enhances loyalty, increases sales, reduces expenses, and streamlines information flow between the center and the company at large -- all of which adds up to substantial bottom-line improvement.

The Real-Time Contact Center is a practical guide to building a service infrastructure that will simultaneously exceed your customers' expectations, and build revenues. This timely book will help you:

Establish the business case for transforming your contact center into a real-time profit center.

* Sort through the technologies and systems that enable real-time contact centers, and learn the best ways to use them.

* Build profitable relationships with sales and marketing.

* Strengthen your self-service applications to improve their efficiency and to reduce dependence on service representatives, enabling significant cost reductions.

* Hire, train, and motivate staff to keep your contact center at the top of its game.

* Make smart, ethical decisions regarding offshore outsourcing.

The book is packed with step-by-step implementation plans for migrating from your current model to the real-time contact center, and offers a complete package of winning strategies, practical guidelines, and best practices. Each chapter includes self-assessment checklists for use by all the crucial players in your contact environment. The Real-Time Contact Center analyzes the business trends that are driving change in the contact center market, and provides vendor names and a market overview of key call center technology, systems, and applications. The book also discusses how to optimize management and processes to ensure your people are well positioned to deliver extraordinary service with every interaction.

Most importantly, The Real-Time Contact Center will show you how to make this crucial transformation without disrupting your current service initiatives. With the powerful tools and practical recommendations in this book, you will transfer quickly and seamlessly to a world-class contact center that's designed to generate substantial revenue, delight your customers, reduce expenses, and make your organization the envy of its industry."

Brand Real is a business strategy guide for making a brand's promise stand up at every customer touch point. Packed with proven, repeatable management practices, the book shows how to establish a clean brand architecture while avoiding the needless complexity that has tripped up many promising companies. Author Laurence Vincent presents cautionary tales of supposed brand superstars as well as instructive case studies of genuine brand giants like American Express, Apple, Cisco, Google, Qualcomm, Virgin, and others. Readers will learn how to connect the outward-facing elements of their brands--logos, advertising, imagery, communications--directly to the core elements of business strategy. Most importantly, they'll explore the correlation between a succinct, efficient brand and powerful, lasting connections with their customers.Companies are becoming increasingly creative in their branding strategies--building identities ranging from the warm and fuzzy to the ultra cool and edgy. But it seems many of these enterprises forget that a brand, at its heart, is a promise to deliver. Brand Real ensures your customers' experiences lives up to that promise and that their loyalties stay with you.

Twitter, smartphones, and self-service kiosks are taking over, and tech-savvy business dealings are no longer an advantage--they're a requirement. With entertaining humor and inarguable logic, author Micah Solomon offers surefire strategies for success by exploring the timelessness of customer service (i.e., what hasn't changed), the high-tech tools that could give you a customer service advantage, and the systemic social shifts that are changing your customer's expectations of the way you do business. You'll learn inside secrets of wildly successful customer service initiatives, from internet startups to venerable brands, and how to turn casual customers into fervent supporters who will spread the word far and wide--online and off. High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service does this by teaching readers the six major customer trends and what they mean for business; the eight unbreakable rules for social media customer service; how to effectively address online complainers and saboteurs on Yelp, Twitter, TripAdvisor, and other forums; how to understand and leverage the rising power of self-service; and how to build a company culture that breeds stellar customer service.With special features including lessons from the latest newsworthy customer service blunders, you'll be equipped to retool old-fashioned customer service and turn time-strapped, screen-addicted, value-savvy, and socially engaged critics into fervent loyal customers who help your business thrive.

In their book Winning Behavior, Terry Bacon and David Pugh showed how great companies outperform good ones through ""behavioral differentiation"" -- going beyond superior products and dependable service to connect with customers at every touchpoint. The Behavioral Advantage broadens the concept, applying behavioral differentiation to the business-to-business arena. The best B2B companies depend on a multifront approach to business interaction, and The Behavioral Advantage reveals the secrets behind what is essentially a chess game with competitors. To win the game, companies must develop a carefully plotted opening game, with all internal values, policies, practices, and behaviors fully aligned. A smart and efficient middle game lets the company build and strengthen its position, and the endgame assures victory and lays the groundwork for future business. Just as individual customers do, B2B customers remember those companies whose behavior consistently and significantly outshines even strong competitors. These firms create a lasting advantage -- and reap the profits that come with it.