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 various important scenarios that a customer service representative is likely to encounter and shows how to best handle each situation. This guide also explains how to make effective use of voice mail, email, fax, and letters.
Give employees effective telephone skills and you will see what a powerful business tool the phone can be. Everything from voice inflection to follow-up calls is covered in this course. Understand customers' needs. Ask effective questions. Master proper telephone techniques.
You must deliver an amazing customer experience. Why? It is the competitive edge of new-era business—in any market and any economy. Renowned customer experience expert Shep Hyken explains how consistently amazing customers through stellar service can elevate your company from good to great. All transformations require a role model, and Shep has found the perfect role model to inspire your team: Ace Hardware. Ace was named as one of the top ten customer service brands in America by Businessweek and ranked highest in its industry for customer satisfaction. Through revealing stories from Ace’s over-the-top work with customers, Shep explores the five tactical areas of customer amazement: leadership, culture, one-on-one, competitive edge, and community. Delivering amazing service requires everyone in your organization to step up and be a leader. It doesn’t take a title. It takes the right set of tools and principles. To help you empower employees at all levels, Shep brings the content to a deeply practical level. His 52 Amazement Tools—like “Ask the extra question” and “Focus on the customer, not the money”—are simple, clear, useful for almost anybody, and supported with compelling research and stories. Between these covers, you will find the tools and tactics you need to transform your company into a seriously customer-focused operation that will amaze every customer every time.
Let's face it, dealing with customers isn't easy. They aren't always right--or even pleasant. But experienced business author Renée Evenson ensures you always have the right words to defuse tense interactions. In Powerful Phrases for Effective Customer Service, she covers thirty challenging customer behaviors and twenty common employee-caused negative encounters to teach readers how to assess circumstances, choose one of many appropriate responses, and confidently and consistently deliver customer satisfaction. Helpful sample scenarios and tangible instructions bring the phrases to life, while detailed explanations bolster your confidence so that you'll have the right words as tools at your disposal and the skills to take action and deliver those words effectively. Practical and insightful, Powerful Phrases for Effective Customer Service ensures you'll never again be at a loss for what to say to customers. By incorporating language that communicates welcome, courtesy, rapport, enthusiasm, assurance, regret, empathy, and appreciation, you'll not only be capable of overcoming obstacles--you'll strengthen all facets of your customer service.
First impressions are often lasting impressions. How customers are treated on the phone can quickly turn them into either an ex-customer or a customer for life. This thorough, quick-reading guide shows anyone who uses the phone -- from salesperson to manager to secretary -- how to treat it as a service tool that directly impacts on company profits. Readers will be able to double their effectiveness when they learn how to:* handle irate customers* end those ""endless"" calls* take meaningful messages* handle conference calls and transfer calls* screen calls and ask focused questions* use the phone during emergencies* improve their voice effectivenessWith worksheets, checklists, and fill-in forms, this desktop primer will inspire fabulous phone service.
As more and more organizations scale back on their in-the-field sales operations, sales pros have had to focus their energy and skills on closing deals over the phone--and doing it faster than ever before. Authors Renee P. Walkup and Sandra McKee's easy-to-follow guide for salespeople trying to generate product excitement over the phone provides quick strategies to help you boost your success rate. Selling to Anyone Over the Phone does this by teaching readers how to ensure callbacks, build trust, partner with decision makers, and use personality-matching techniques to build connections with and relate to people they can't see face-to-face. The fully updated second edition includes new chapters on using advanced technology (e.g., webinars and teleconferencing) and selling to customers from other cultures and countries. Complete with an invaluable appendix on handling customer complaints and new sample call dialogs, Selling to Anyone Ove the Phone simplifies an increasingly important facet of the sales role so you can get back to doing what you do best--providing excellent products and services to your customers and exceeding your sales goals.
If you’re aspiring to satisfy your customers, then you’re aspiring to mediocrity. That’s the fascinating premise of From Impressed to Obsessed, a book that will fundamentally change how you think about creating a successful, beloved business. Acclaimed customer experience expert Jon Picoult explains why building customer loyalty requires leaving indelible positive impressions on everyone you work with—not just shaping their experiences, but also shaping their memories. Picoult explores the cognitive science behind great customer experiences, pinpointing the breakthrough, psychology-based strategies that both industry leaders (like Apple, Disney, and Southwest Airlines) as well as fast-growing startups (like BILT and Framebridge) use to shape people’s perceptions and sculpt unforgettable impressions—thereby turning more sales prospects into customers, and more customers into obsessed brand ambassadors. Packed with intriguing case studies, engaging stories, and eye-opening research, the book details these proven principles and illustrates how they can be applied to almost any type of business or customer. Examples include cases that show how to: • Create Peaks & Avoid Valleys—leverage the science of memory to etch positive impressions in people’s minds, by creating greater experiential peaks and fewer experiential valleys. • Give the Perception of Control—the almost magical power of giving customers a sense of agency, via choice and expectation-setting, causing them to feel better about the experience a business is already delivering. • Make It Effortless—make interactions easy for customers, not just from a physical perspective, but also a cognitive one, to satisfy today’s demand for simplicity and convenience. • Stir Emotion—harness the power of emotion as a memory cue, by infusing customer experiences with emotional resonance, highlighting positive feelings while stemming negative ones. No matter what kind of constituency you serve—customers or colleagues, individuals or institutions, employees or employment candidates—this book will help you do it with distinction. Picoult’s message is particularly relevant for managers, as he shows the parallels between how great companies cultivate engagement with customers, and how great leaders accomplish the same with their workforce. From Impressed to Obsessed reveals the what, the why, and—most importantly—the how behind great customer experiences. Filled with actionable insights, the book provides an invaluable roadmap for becoming the company that everyone wants to do business with, the employer everyone wants to work for, and the leader everyone wants to follow.
Praise for SMART CALLING "Finally, a sales book that makes sense! As a master sales trainer, Art nailed—no, obliterated—the number one fear of selling in this great book: cold calling! Let him teach you to stop cold calling and start Smart Calling!"—LARRY WINGET, television personality and New York Times bestselling author "Smart Calling is the benchmark as the highest professional standard for effective cold calling. Take the initiative to read and implement Art's rational principles and you will sell much more and develop a prospect base of potential customers who will call you when they are ready to purchase or graciously take your future calls. This is THE BEST sales text I have read in the past twenty years."—REX CASWELL, PhD, VP, LexisNexis Telephone Sales "You get only one chance to make the right impression in sales. If a top prospect gets a hundred calls a week, you want to be the one he remembers and buys from. Art's proven methods create a unique brand for you and position your offering as the best option. Art's advice isn't just smart, it's priceless."—BOB SILVY, VP, Corporate Marketing, American City Business Journals "Smart Calling effectively enables inside sales reps and organizations to accomplish a top priority—acquiring new customers. Art's pragmatic and actionable techniques will increase productivity, success, and professional satisfaction."—BILL McALISTER, SVP, Inside Sales, McAfee "A must-read, must-own book for anyone who wants to increase their sales right away with less effort and more fun. I'm so sure this book is a winner for anyone who needs to call prospects that I'll personally assure you that your results will increase noticeably after reading it, or I'll send you your money back."—MIKE FAITH, CEO & President, Headsets.com, Inc. "If you need to make a first call to anyone, for whatever reason, this book is for you. More than common sense, it's a real-world, no-fluff, simple approach that anyone can use to be successful."—DARCI MAENPA, President, West Coast Chapter, American Teleservices Association; Director, Member Support, Toastmasters International
In this groundbreaking book, Bill Price and David Jaffe offer a new, game-changing approach, showing how managers are taking the wrong path and are using the wrong metrics to measure customer service. Customer service, they assert, is only needed when a company does something wrong—eliminating the need for service is the best way to satisfy customers. To be successful, companies need to treat service as a data point of dysfunction and figure what they need to do to eliminate the demand. The Best Service Is No Service outlines these seven principles to deliver the best service that ultimately leads to "no service": Eliminate dumb contacts Create engaging self-service Be proactive Make it easy to contact your company Own the actions across the company Listen and act Deliver great service experiences
The success of any organization depends on high-quality customer service. But for companies that strategically align customer service with their overall corporate strategy, it can transcend typical good business to become a profitable word-of-mouth machine that will transform the bottom line. Drawing on over thirty years of research for companies such as 3M, American Express, Chik-Fil-A, USAA, Coca-Cola, FedEx, GE, Cisco Systems, Neiman Marcus, and Toyota, author Goodman uses formal research, case studies, and patented practices to show readers how they can: • calculate the financial impact of good and bad customer service • make the financial case for customer service improvements • systematically identify the causes of problems • align customer service with their brand • harness customer service strategy into their organization's culture and behavior Filled with proven strategies and eye-opening case studies, this book challenges many aspects of conventional wisdom—using hard data—and reveals how any organization can earn more loyalty, win more customers...and improve their financial bottom line.
