Customer Service Is More Than A Department

If you serve people, at any level of a company, this book is for you. There is a greater awareness today for the improtance of providing good customer service and fundamental to our serving others is a belief that we must treat each other with respect.

With global markets more crowded than ever, it is a major challenge for organizations to attract and retain customers due to the competition they are faced with. This text is designed to teach exemplary customer service thinking in public or private, domestic or international organizations and is written in a practical, common sense manner reflecting current customer service concepts and hints.

In the Two Factor Theory of Customer Service, author David L. Elwood nudges the entire field of customer service toward becoming a professional discipline. Customer service is not a casual, do-it-if-you-think-of-it aspect of business; customer service is a real business product that stands beside the primary product of every business enterprise; it is inescapable and it is inextricably tied to profits. Elwood uses easy to follow ideas that open the door to fresh, persuasive perceptions of the fundamental dimensions of customer service events: accessible, emotional, temporal, informational, solutional, aptitudinal, and relational. The essence of Elwoods message is that the more clearly and deeply one understands customer service events, the more effective he or she will become at delivering customer service straight to the customer. And, as powerful, empirical research findings have shown, delivery of Superior Customer Service goes hand in hand with superior profits. The Two Factor Theory of Customer Service will delight everyone looking for a systematic approach to understanding and classifying the seemingly unending differences found in published examples of Superior Customer Service, and it will brighten the pathway for each provider seeking to increase profits. Without question, you ARE in the customer service business --- the only question is whether you are doing it well. Want a quick read at the airport terminal thatll entertain more than transform? Two Factor Theory of Customer Service isnt it! Elwood skips the clichs while delivering a perfect balance of theory and immediate application that will change how you see your customers, and more importantly how your customers will see you (again and again and again...). Jay Martinson, Ph.D. Chair, Communications Department, Olivet Nazarene University

Everyone knows that the best way to create customer loyalty is with service so good, so over the top, that it surprises and delights. But what if everyone is wrong? In their acclaimed bestseller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted many longstanding myths about sales. Now they’ve turned their research and analysis to a new vital business subject—customer loyalty—with a new book that turns the conventional wisdom on its head. The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it. They devote untold time, energy, and resources to trying to dazzle people and inspire their undying loyalty. Yet CEB’s careful research over five years and tens of thousands of respondents proves that the “dazzle factor” is wildly overrated—it simply doesn’t predict repeat sales, share of wallet, or positive wordof-mouth. The reality: Loyalty is driven by how well a company delivers on its basic promises and solves day-to-day problems, not on how spectacular its service experience might be. Most customers don’t want to be “wowed”; they want an effortless experience. And they are far more likely to punish you for bad service than to reward you for good service. If you put on your customer hat rather than your manager or marketer hat, this makes a lot of sense. What do you really want from your cable company, a free month of HBO when it screws up or a fast, painless restoration of your connection? What about your bank—do you want free cookies and a cheerful smile, even a personal relationship with your teller? Or just a quick in-and-out transaction and an easy way to get a refund when it accidentally overcharges on fees? The Effortless Experience takes readers on a fascinating journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes customers loyal—and disloyal. The authors lay out the four key pillars of a low-effort customer experience, along the way delivering robust data, shocking insights and profiles of companies that are already using the principles revealed by CEB’s research, with great results. And they include many tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, decrease customer churn, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the “dazzle factor” fails to deliver. The rewards are there for the taking, and the pathway to achieving them is now clearly marked.

Customer Service For Dummies, Third Edition integrates the unbeatable information from Customer Service For Dummies and Online Customer Service For Dummies to form an all-in-one guide to customer loyalty for large and small businesses alike. The book covers the fundamentals of service selling and presents up-to-date advice on such fundamentals as help desks, call centers, and IT departments. Plus, it shows readers how to take stock of their customer service strengths and weaknesses, create useful customer surveys, and learn from the successes and failures of businesses just like theirs. Karen Leland and Keith Bailey (Sausalito, CA) are cofounders of Sterling Consulting Group, an international consulting firm specializing in quality service consulting and training for such clients as Oracle, IBM, Avis, and Lucent.

If you’ve heard and read all you want to know about how bad service is in the world and how important service is to customers and to your bottom line, you may be ready for a little action. After many recent articles and books dealing with the need for quality service, few business managers remain unconvinced. Many, however, remain unequipped to express their commitment in action. The mission of this book is to equip the already convinced to implement the already proved: service is a strategy as powerful as marketing and as potent as a quality product itself in the ongoing effort to realize the full profit potential of a company. This book gives you detailed, step-by-step knowledge that you can use in establishing profitable customer service strategies. The profit-producing capability of an organization derives from impressions made by all employees on the organization’s customers. The means of creating these impressions are the quality and efficacy of the product or service that the employees sell: the quality, accuracy, dependability, and speed of their service — and the warmth of their human relationships with customers. Training and motivation for people who actually deliver service and how-to-do-it implementation instructions are the twin I-beams supporting the substance of this book. They are: The reason this book was written. The features that distinguish this book from other books on service. Among key benefits to readers of this book are: Hands-on ideas, skills, and techniques that can be used immediately. Knowledge about shaping employee attitudes, a powerful competitive force moving a firm toward greater market share, customer loyalty, and profitability.

Writing in a humorous conversational style, Chief Alan Brunacini explains the application of common-sense customer service concepts to the fire service. Essentials of Fire Department Customer Service is basic reading for every firefighter, officer, and administrator.

In this pathbreaking book, world-renowned Harvard Business School service firm experts James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr. and Leonard A. Schlesinger reveal that leading companies stay on top by managing the service profit chain. Why are a select few service firms better at what they do -- year in and year out -- than their competitors? For most senior managers, the profusion of anecdotal "service excellence" books fails to address this key question. Based on five years of painstaking research, the authors show how managers at American Express, Southwest Airlines, Banc One, Waste Management, USAA, MBNA, Intuit, British Airways, Taco Bell, Fairfield Inns, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the Merry Maids subsidiary of ServiceMaster employ a quantifiable set of relationships that directly links profit and growth to not only customer loyalty and satisfaction, but to employee loyalty, satisfaction, and productivity. The strongest relationships the authors discovered are those between (1) profit and customer loyalty; (2) employee loyalty and customer loyalty; and (3) employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Moreover, these relationships are mutually reinforcing; that is, satisfied customers contribute to employee satisfaction and vice versa. Here, finally, is the foundation for a powerful strategic service vision, a model on which any manager can build more focused operations and marketing capabilities. For example, the authors demonstrate how, in Banc One's operating divisions, a direct relationship between customer loyalty measured by the "depth" of a relationship, the number of banking services a customer utilizes, and profitability led the bank to encourage existing customers to further extend the bank services they use. Taco Bell has found that their stores in the top quadrant of customer satisfaction ratings outperform their other stores on all measures. At American Express Travel Services, offices that ticket quickly and accurately are more profitable than those which don't. With hundreds of examples like these, the authors show how to manage the customer-employee "satisfaction mirror" and the customer value equation to achieve a "customer's eye view" of goods and services. They describe how companies in any service industry can (1) measure service profit chain relationships across operating units; (2) communicate the resulting self-appraisal; (3) develop a "balanced scorecard" of performance; (4) develop a recognitions and rewards system tied to established measures; (5) communicate results company-wide; (6) develop an internal "best practice" information exchange; and (7) improve overall service profit chain performance. What difference can service profit chain management make? A lot. Between 1986 and 1995, the common stock prices of the companies studied by the authors increased 147%, nearly twice as fast as the price of the stocks of their closest competitors. The proven success and high-yielding results from these high-achieving companies will make The Service Profit Chain required reading for senior, division, and business unit managers in all service companies, as well as for students of service management.

Even the most casual reader leafing through the pages of this book will quickly realize that it is not the thoughts of one indi vidual set down on paper, but rather the synergism of many people. Herbert Goeler of American Cyanamid and Keith Slater of Johns-Manville, the latter now retired, are certainly the brightest stars in my particular customer service galaxy. They have been well-springs of information, thinkers and thought starters, friends and fellow-believers, for almost two decades. Without the encouragement and inspiration they gave me, this book would be much shorter and far less relevant. In 1984, my firm presented Herb and Keith with our special "Patron Saint" Award; it doesn't say nearly enough for what they have meant to me personally and, through me, to the field of customer service management where I disseminate ideas and guidance as an editor and teacher. Some years ago, the American Management Associations asked me to chair a series of seminars on Customer Service Management in the U. S. and Canada. Through this activity I met many wonderful people who in many cases taught me more than I taught them.

Customer service is of particular importance to the technology industry; customers rely on technical support services when they have a problem with a piece of hardware, software, or a consumer device. The current darling of the technology industry is Apple, and you don t have to go farther than the Genius Bar at your local Apple Store to see how Apple approaches customer service, creating a fantastic customer experience that ensures rabid fans. Most people think of customer service as a department, and it s true virtually every company has some sort of customer service division. But customer service is also a technology industry all on its own, with a wide array of software and hardware required to support customers with product and service questions. This book gives an insider s view of the customer service industry, providing insight for those of you battling mediocre service every day. If you understand the tools, vocabulary, and metrics that power customer service, you can definitely demand better service from your providers, and understand how to appropriately deal with service issues. And for those already working in the customer service industry, hopefully this book will provide you with some new best practices, worst practices to avoid, and maybe even a laugh or two along the way.