Customer Service

CONTENTS: First Impressions, Observation and Information Gathering, Stereotyping, Workplace Stressors, Credibility, Assertiveness, Mental Flexibility, Dealing with Anger, Verbal Instructions, Communication, Body Language and Culture, Voice Quality, International Communication, Influencing Through Listening, Optimizing Resources, Memory Ticklers, Time Management, Problem Interpretation, Creative Action Planning, Win-Win Negotiation, Service Strategies, Exceeding Expectations, Service Attitude, Telephone Etiquette, Customer Comment Cards, Acknowledging Customer Concerns, Letters of Complaint, Internal Customers, Individual vs.Team Performance, Team Member Trust, Peer Recognition & Feedback, Constructive Competition.

What distinguishes America's Service Meltdown: Restoring Service Excellence in the Age of the Customer is its striking originality and applicability to businesses of nearly every type and size. Based on the author's extensive personal and professional experience, the book offers a straightforward, no nonsense model that clearly explains how to organize the modern enterprise for the delivery of service excellence.

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.

This course will demonstrate communication techniques that build customer loyalty, and how to defuse customer anger with attentive listening and empathy, focus on the customer's needs without blaming, and respond to personal accusations without becoming defensive. Customers are your most important assets, but sometimes they get upset. It's critical to learn what steps to take to address the situation quickly and tactfully, and what can be done to keep the customer coming back. You will learn how listening, nonverbal communication, feedback, and management all help to deal with an unhappy customer, and turn the situation into a positive one.

The Customer Service Activity Book presents an array of dynamic and engaging activities that:
• Reinforce what good customer service is -- and is not
• Demonstrate how to work together most constructively and efficiently
• Prove the value and the importance of "sharing the load"
• Show how to increase productivity and performance while enhancing relationships with customers

Putting together a social media team -- Examples of how it doesn't work (and what happens) -- Before the explosion: winning your customer -- Customer service is a way of life -- Social media damage control: stopping small problems from becoming big ones -- Making customer addicts online: best practices that work! -- Keeping the addiction going -- Monitoring your successes and failures -- Putting it all together: what did we learn?

Taking your first steps: the basics -- Tossing the ball back and forth: effective communication -- Jumping in with both feet: relationship building -- Seeing eye to eye: face to face contacts -- Saying it with a smile: telephone contacts -- Looking before you leap: e-customer contacts -- Giving when getting is not expected: self service contacts -- Calming before the storm: difficult customer contacts -- Hitting the ground running: ready, set, go -- Being the best you can be: the total package.

Discusses the separate but related concepts of customer satisfaction and service quality. It then offers procedures and tools for planning and establishing customer satisfaction and service quality documentation systems and measuring them in library settings. Much of it relates to the SERVQUAL instrument developed for the private sector that measures the gap between expectations and perceptions of service quality.

The ineffective squeaker doesn't get the grease -- The trouble with Bill: the hidden costs of ineffective squeaking -- Complaining therapy: squeaking our way to self-esteem -- When to squeak: how to avoid complaining dangers -- The ingredients for serving a delicious squeak -- The art of squeaking to loved ones -- Getting squeaked at for a living: the customer service professional -- Squeaking as social activism.

Professional movers: who's your Gladys? -- The Canfield Companies: where's my refrigerator? -- Paul Reed Smith Guitars: starting from scratch -- Singapore Airlines: the tea service tells the story -- ISCO Industries: a good manhole is hard to find -- The Green Company: who's going up the ladder? -- Preston Wynne Spa: massaging egos -- ClearVision Optical: SurveyMonkey around -- Sky Lakes Medical Center: take, don't tell -- Communicore Visual Communications: the happy challenge -- A final review -- The practical points -- Recommended "who's your Gladys?" resources.

Random acts of rudeness : customer encounters, Comcast, and customer rage -- What would Alexander Graham Bell say now? : the telephone and the birth of today's customer service industry -- "You're going to listen to me" : Internet advocacy, Consumerist.com, AOL, GetHuman.com, and Sweden -- To send us your firstborn, please press or say: "One" : automation , Amtrak Julie, artificial intelligence, and eavesdropping -- The other end of the line : call centers, JetBlue, reps, supervisors, prisons, and CustomersSuck.com -- The next available agent: John, Juan, Sean, or Sanjay : international outsourcing, Argentina, TeleTech, Egypt, and the United Kingdom -- The solution is the problem : the old AT&T wireless, Sprint, consultants, cottage industries, and CRM -- Absolutely, positively : FedEx, Zappos.com, Credit Suisse, and CEOs.

As customers, we can be wowed, yet still not be wooed. What happens to us that turns allure into allegiance? What is the anatomy of customer love? And, what can organizations do to attract customer love? Customer love is more than a serendipitous, starry-eyed moment. "Love" is code for many emotions: adoration, devotion, and passionate attachment. It is that warm feeling you get when you feel a special, sometimes unexplainable connection.

Exceptional customer service is crucial to a successful phone-based business. Quality service can secure customer loyalty, while poor service can lose it. This concise guide examines every important scenario that a customer service representative is likely to encounter and shows how to best handle each situation. It also explains how to make effective use of voice mail, email, fax, and letters.

Society is rapidly moving from a service economy to an experience economy. As a result, today's more sophisticated consumers not only demand services and products that are of the highest quality; they also want positive, emotionally satisfying experiences. The companies and institutions that learn how to add emotional value to their customers' experiences will leave their competitors behind.

This book details a practice for adding emotional value to customers' experiences and to those of staff. The practices show that by understanding the critical role emotions play in creating customer experiences, organizations can take their service to new levels.

In this in-depth look at the customer care element of e-business, Brian Clegg offers an innovative, hands-on guide to an oddly neglected but crucial topic. In today's digital Wonderland - where companies deal with customers they cannot see and less contact time is better - the old rules and skills no longer apply.

Just Say Yes! highlights the methods necessary to keep existing customers happy and find new ones. The methods proposed here are not always simple, but they are enormously effective.

-- Use extreme customer service as a power-selling technique for customer retention.
-- Developing a system of customer service that actually delivers what your customers are looking for.
-- Saying "thank you" and meaning it.
-- Motivating all your employees to "extreme-service" the customer.
-- Understanding what business you're really in.

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.

This book focuses on the customer service principles espoused by the Nordstrom department store chain, a legend in retailing and customer service. It shows how the Nordstrom customer service culture can work in any company or industry—computer repair centers, bicycle shops, medical clinics, credit unions, and more. The book features case studies from many companies that have successfully adopted and adapted the lessons from The Nordstrom Way, the author's successful book about the founding of Nordstrom and the beliefs the Nordstrom family imparts to its employees.

Helps other companies apply Nordstrom's principles to their own customer service practices -- Provides lessons on how to find and focus on customer needs, follow-up, and ensure customer satisfaction

I hate people -- The ten least wanted -- Stumbling blocks -- Wrong turns -- Time wasters -- Flying solo -- The soloist -- Solocrafting -- Office life -- Running interference -- Off my plate -- The disrupters -- Fool the rules -- Spaces and places -- Dig my cave -- Island hopping.