The one-sentence summary

Train your people to speak in the right way with their colleagues and customers.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYSEXCEPTIONAL SERVICE

  • Delivering brilliant service leads to higher profits via customer loyalty.
  • The process only needs to be mastered once and then the rules can be applied successfully for a lifetime.
  • There are five important elements:
    1. Selecting, training and inspiring loyalty virtuosos at all levels
    2. Handling service breakdowns in a systematic way that makes customers more loyal than if the mishap hadn’t happened
    3. Gathering and using customer preference data
    4. Ensuring you meet customers’ timeliness and quality expectations
    5. Personalising the experience of online customers
  • The four main elements of customer satisfaction are perfect product, caring delivery, timeliness, and an effective problem resolution process.
  • Language engineering is important. A consistent style of speech comes from an established lexicon of preferred language and phrasing that everyone should be trained to use.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • If you work in a service industry you can take the examples and apply them. For example, the four steps to great service recoveries:
    1. Apologize
    2. Review the complaint with the customer
    3. Fix the problem and follow up
    4. Document it to stop it happening again
  • Keeping track of customer preferences is a way to keep them coming back. You need a simple system that can be accessed in real time, but beware making assumptions because their preferences can change.
  • You can work through an organization from the leaders to the most junior staff to inculcate them with a service ethic, which affects recruitment, training and reinforcement.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • Not much. It’s an easy read.