Delight Your Customers

Discover the hidden ways to raise your organizations’ customer service experiences from ordinary to extraordinary. If you want to know how strong your company’s customer service is, ask your employees to describe what their work entails. Then pay attention to whether they simply list their duties and tasks or if they speak to the true essence of their job--to create delighted customers who will be less price sensitive, have higher repurchase rates, and enthusiastically recommend the company or brand to others. The latter should be every employee’s highest priority, because when it’s not, your customers are merely the recipients of a transaction, not an experience, and transactions do not make for a lasting impression or inspire loyalty. In Delight Your Customers, customer service expert Steve Curtin makes a compelling case that customer service managers need to shift from monitoring service activities to modeling, recognizing, and reinforcing the behaviors that create happy and returning customers. Things such as: Expressing genuine interest Offering sincere compliments Sharing unique knowledge Conveying authentic enthusiasm Providing pleasant surprises Delivering service heroics when needed Simply based on their own personal experiences, everyone knows that great customer service is rare. So why wouldn’t you want to provide a unique, caring, and beneficial experience for all your customers to rave about with others? With the real-world stories, examples, and strategies shared in Delight Your Customers, you can take the customer service experience you offer from ordinary to extraordinary.

THE NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER! The secret to successful word-of-mouth marketing on the social web is easy: BE LIKEABLE. A friend's recommendation is more powerful than any advertisement. In the world of Facebook, Twitter, and beyond, that recommendation can travel farther and faster than ever before. Likeable Social Media helps you harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing to transform your business. Listen to your customers and prospects. Deliver value, excitement, and surprise. And most important, learn how to truly engage your customers and help them spread the word. Praise for Likeable Social Media: Dave Kerpen's insights and clear, how-to instructions on building brand popularity by truly engaging with customers on Facebook, Twitter, and the many other social media platforms are nothing short of brilliant. Jim McCann, founder of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM and Celebrations.com Alas, common sense is not so common. Dave takes you on a (sadly, much needed) guided tour of how to be human in a digital world. Seth Godin, author of Poke the Box Likeable Social Media cuts through the marketing jargon and technical detail to give you what you really need to make sense of this rapidly changing world of digital marketing and communications. Being human — being likeable — will get you far. Scott Monty, Global Digital Communications, Ford Motor Company Dave gives you what you need: Practical, specific how-to advice to get people talking about you. Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking

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.

Deliver a better business experience, for every kind of customer A "one-size fits all" approach to customer service is no longer viable. Businesses competing on service need to understand and cater to customers' racial, ethnic, religious, generational, and geographic differences in order to meet or exceed customers' service expectations. Crafting the Customer Experience to People Not Like You shows how companies, brands, and products struggling to differentiate themselves in a sea of sameness can foster long-term loyalty and brand preference with exceptional and customized customer service. A detailed guide to core customer groups including women, the five generations (matures, Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z), racial and ethnic segments, such as Hispanics and African-Americans, as well as those who are defined by key lifestyle and life-stage attributes Includes onsumer insights that will help business leaders deliver a better business experience with every customer You cannot control the economy, the stock market or the costs of goods and labor. But you can control your organization's customer service. It's an empowering thought. Customer service is 100% in your control at all times and it's more important than ever.

Kaufman takes you on a journey into the new world of service. Learn how the world's leading companies have changed the game, and how you can successfully follow this path to an uplifting service transformation.

This text shows how customer "delight" not just customer satisfaction drives repeat purchasing and customer loyalty. It shows how to monitor customer delight against revenue, investment, resources and benchmark results. The book also has case studies to show how to keep up customer delight.

Attract, engage, and delight customers online Inbound Marketing, Revised and Updated: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online is a comprehensive guide to increasing online visibility and engagement. Written by top marketing and startup bloggers, the book contains the latest information about customer behavior and preferred digital experiences. From the latest insights on lead nurturing and visual marketing to advice on producing remarkable content by building tools, readers will gain the information they need to transform their marketing online. With outbound marketing methods becoming less effective, the time to embrace inbound marketing is now. Cold calling, e-mail blasts, and direct mail are turning consumers off to an ever-greater extent, so consumers are increasingly doing research online to choose companies and products that meet their needs. Inbound Marketing recognizes these behavioral changes as opportunities, and explains how marketers can make the most of this shift online. This not only addresses turning strangers into website visitors, but explains how best to convert those visitors to leads, and to nurture those leads to the point of becoming delighted customers. Gain the insight that can increase marketing value with topics like: Inbound marketing – strategy, reputation, and tracking progress Visibility – getting found, and why content matters Converting customers – turning prospects into leads and leads into customers Better decisions – picking people, agencies, and campaigns The book also contains essential tools and resources that help build an effective marketing strategy, and tips for organizations of all sizes looking to build a reputation. When consumer behaviors change, marketing must change with them. The fully revised and updated edition of Inbound Marketing is a complete guide to attracting, engaging, and delighting customers online.

A Wall Street Journal bestseller Why are Mercedes-Benz customers so loyal and passionate? Because the people at Mercedes-Benz are Driven to Delight In his previous bestsellers--The Starbucks Experience, The New Gold Standard, and Prescription for Excellence--Joseph Michelli revealed customer experience practices and strategies of beloved businesses. Now, in this timely new book, he shares the greatest customer-driven insights behind one of the most iconic brand names in the world: Mercedes-Benz USA. DRIVEN TO DELIGHT reveals: How Mercedes-Benz USA launched a multi-year program to elevate their customer experience--even though their product was already “best in class.” How they activated people, improved processes, and deployed technology to emotionally engage customers. How the Mercedes-Benz approach can jump-start any customer-driven business—by accelerating your commitment to the customer experience. Filled with exclusive front-seat insights from Mercedes-Benz employees, eye-opening testimonials from passionate Mercedes-Benz fans, and solid nuts-and-bolts advice for creating your own consumer-aligned road map, Driven to Delight will help you retool your strategies, reignite your customers, and refuel your team for the long haul. Mercedes-Benz. The name alone conjures images of luxury, innovation, quality, and performance. But in today’s market, you need more than a world-class product to outpace the competition--which is why the executives at Mercedes-Benz USA set a course to create a customer experience in keeping with their legendary cars. This is the story of how an organization became Driven to Delight. It reveals the action plan Mercedes-Benz USA used to catapult the company to first place rankings in national customer satisfaction studies while at the same time growing sales and profits. With unprecedented access to company personnel, customer experience expert Joseph Michelli charts the journey the company took and identifies the all-important keys to driving delight in any customer-based organization. You’ll learn how to: Create a compelling vision for exceptional customer experiences Identify the ever changing wants, needs, and desires of your customer segments Map out your key customer journeys and high value contact points Effectively evaluate customer perceptions throughout their journey with you Resolve customer needs swiftly and constantly improve your delivery processes Link rewards and recognition to customer experience excellence throughout your organization These proven techniques are part of the Mercedes-Benz USA “Driven to Delight” culture which sets a new gold standard in customer service, employee engagement, and peak performance. You’ll find step-by-step strategies that can be customized to fit your business model and customer needs. You’ll discover invaluable tools like Vision Mapping, Customer Journey Wheels, Customer-Centric Strategy and Resource Planning Processes --plus 20 Key Questions you can use to diagnose your progress and steer your company in the right direction. Along the way, you’ll get a rare first-hand comprehensive view of a world-class company in action. You’ll see how a “best or nothing” organization became customer obsessed, mile after mile, year after year. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to ramp up your own customer experience, rev up your customer commitment, and take your customers on a journey that’s bound to delight--the Mercedes-Benz way. Joseph A. Michelli is an internationally sought-after speaker, author, and organizational consultant. His books include The Starbucks Experience, The New Gold Standard, The Zappos Experience, Leading the Starbucks Way, and Prescription for Excellence, which hit #1 on The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller lists.

`A truly insightful book laced with numerous examples... The host of practical insights, meticulously documented, will resonate very well and should push one to soul search on the way on is handling one's customers' - Lloyd Mathias, Executive Vice President - Marketing, Pepsi Cola India `Began browsing... and felt like a CRM guru by the end of the day! Unputdownable!' - Amrit Kiran Singh, VP and Area Director, Brown Forman Eurasia and Africa Written in an accessible and user-friendly style this book discusses the beginnings of customer relationship management (CRM) using India as an example of an expanding `customer care' service provider and analyzes the growing need for better customer understanding to build successful enterprises. It focuses on an integrated approach to CRM and the tools required for practising it, including: database management; call centres; customer relationship management technologies; and soft skills/communication.

Marketing by Delight will teach you new ways to absolutely delight your customers and increase your sales and commissions at the same time! We'll give you real life examples of successes from some extraordinary marketers. Your eyes will be opened to new ways of thinking about customer relations.