Customer Satisfaction Is Worthless, Customer Loyalty Is Priceless
In his clear and fluff-free book, Jeffrey Gitomer teaches (and challenges) us to go beyond mere satisfaction and aim for customer loyalty. His “Customer Service Self Evaluation Test,” one of several useful tools in the book, will give you an honest appraisal of your strengths and weaknesses in customer service.
The Best Service Is No Service
Bill Price, Amazon’s former Global VP of Customer Service, pairs up with consultant David Jaffe to offer a framework for reducing “bad contact” with customers — those conversations that aren’t valuable for either party involved. Their Value-Irritant matrix is a powerful tool for focusing your customer service where it will have the most impact.
Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit
For years, every new Campaign Monitor support agent received a copy of this book by Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon on their first day. It’s highly readable, with detailed analysis on crafting carefully planned customer experiences. Their example of Ritz-Carlton’s “use” and “do not use” word list for team members is something many customer service teams could adapt to their own tone and approach.
The Starbucks Experience
Author Joseph Michelli spent two years figuring out how Starbucks was able to take a commodity product like coffee and sell it for several times the typical cost. His book is an overview of how Starbucks was able to grow and continue to delight customers over time.
Customer Loyalty: How to Earn It, How to Keep It
Jill Griffin focuses on the factors that affect customer loyalty in this highly practical book filled with tactics you can implement in your own business. Griffin’s core message is that there is no technological “silver bullet” that will solve your business’s growth problems, so you need to get back to the basics of providing a service that your customers will want to use over time.
The Effortless Experience
Author Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at the CEB use data collected from hundreds of companies and over 100,000 customers to bust a few common customer service myths, namely that “delight” is vastly overrated. They claim reduced customer effort is the one true driver of loyalty. The second half of the book outlines ways to reduce effort across the customer experience.
Be Our Guest
This book by the Disney Institute starts out with a promise to “take you behind the scenes to discover Disney best practices and philosophies in action”, and it delivers on that promise. We love the idea that “Everything speaks” and that customer experience is more than how your team answers the phone — it’s every interaction they have with you and your brand, wherever they occur.
The Loyalty Effect
Frederick Reichheld’s Harvard Business Review article “The One Number You Need to Grow” introduced us to the now omnipresent NPS survey as a way to measure customer loyalty. In this book, he and his co-author make the case for customer loyalty as the most important factor in profitability.
Strategic Customer Service
John Goodman was involved in the study of consumer complaint-handling practices (conducted by TARP under the sponsorship of the White House Office of Consumer Affairs). Much of the book is spent breaking down his practical approach to creating a customer experience strategy that does the job right the first time, using feedback and complaints from customers to identify opportunities for proactive service.
SOURCE: https://www.helpscout.net/helpu/customer-service-books/
