Customer Service
Essential Books
If you work at a Fortune 500
company and live in southern Connecticut or New York's
Westchester County (two of Manhattan's most affluent
suburbs), chances are you buy your suits at Mitchells (in
Westport, Conn.) or Richards (in Greenwich, Conn.). These
two independent clothing stores are some of the most
successful in the business and outfit CEOs from Chase, GE,
IBM, Merrill Lynch and Pepsi. Mitchell, whose father
started the business, shares the secret of his success in
this unoriginal but cheerful guide to keeping customers
happy. Hugging your customers, he says, has nothing to do
with being touchy-feely around them and everything to do
with offering them over-the-top service. For Mitchell,
that means literally offering a customer the coat off your
back, if that's the only one left in the store in the
customer's size and preferred style and color.
In What Clients Love,
marketing maven Harry Beckwith offers valuable lessons
about capturing and keeping clients. (As Beckwith puts it,
"Competence gets firms into the game that relationships
win.") Using snappy examples from Absolut Vodka, Kinko’s,
Starbucks, and Ian Schrager’s boutique hotels, he
organizes his advice by describing four significant social
trends that shape client needs and loyalty. Beckwith’s
strategies for coping with information overload focus on
getting to the point--using a shorter sell and fewer
superlatives. He makes a clever and convincing case for
giving both testimonials and blurbs the death penalty. He
details the decline of client trust with a plan to
eliminate cold calls, dress for success, and a spot-on
critique of PowerPoint ("Lincoln had no slides at
Gettysburg.") Other chapters explore the limits of the
Internet and offer nongimmicky ideas about creating a
brand, including 20 questions for choosing a name for your
business.
Designing the
Customer-Centric Organization offers today’s
business leaders a comprehensive customer-centric
organizational model that clearly shows how to put in
place an infrastructure that is organized around the
demands of the customer. Written by Jay Galbraith (the
foremost expert in the field of organizational design),
this important book includes a tool that will help
determine how customer-centric an organization is-
light-level, medium-level, complete-level, or high-level-
and it shows how to ascertain the appropriate level for a
particular institution. Once the groundwork has been
established, the author offers guidance for the process of
implementing a customer-centric system throughout an
organization. Designing the Customer-Centric
Organization includes vital information about
structure, management processes, reward and management
systems, and people practices.
In today’s competitive
marketplace, customer relationship management is critical
to a company’s profitability and long-term success. To
become more customer focused, skilled managers, IT
professionals and marketing executives must understand how
to build profitable relationships with each customer and
to make managerial decisions every day designed to
increase the value of a company by making managerial
decisions that will grow the value of the customer base.
The goal is to build long-term relationships with
customers and generate increased customer loyalty and
higher margins. In Managing Customer Relationships, Don
Peppers and Martha Rogers, credited with founding the
customer-relationship revolution in 1993 when they
invented the term "one-to-one marketing," provide the
definitive overview of what it takes to keep customers
coming back for years to come.
Help your employees to excel
in dealing with the public with this stimulating,
fun-filled collection of customer service training games.
Designed not only to teach important skills but also to
spark enthusiasm and a high level of involvement in the
participants, these games utilize entertaining and
instructive techniques such as role-playing, charades,
brainstorming, and debate. As a result of these exercises,
employees will learn how to create a rapport with the
customer, how to focus on the unique needs of individual
customers, how to maintain a positive attitude, and more.
For more customer service
books see Customer
Service Books 2
For books on other topics
such as cold calling, telemarketing etc. -
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