WE RECOMMEND

Regarding Customer Service

If you need a practical training manual for your customer service representatives – you should look at this book. Part One contains a concise “forest from the trees” overview of customer service and sixty practical customer service tools and techniques. Part Two goes a step further and provides excellent examples for dealing with specific customer situations.

Although oriented towards the improvement of patient satisfaction in hospitals, the observations this book contains regarding how to elicit and disseminate feedback, require accountability and conduct service recovery are easily extrapolated into any business scenario. The research underlying this report is boiled down into sixteen poignant lessons learned from actual service quality exemplars.

A very easy read, this book’s central theme is simple: satisfied customers translate into profitable businesses. The authors use interesting, real-world examples to demonstrate that customer satisfaction can be quantifiably linked to profits. This book provides numerous practical suggestions for reaching each customer category (advocates, apathetics and assassins) and encourages readers to critically analyze the return on investment of their company’s customer service initiatives.

This book provides employees and managers with a pragmatic set of foundation skills for effectively serving and satisfying customers. It is the author’s contention that virtually all companies say customer satisfaction is important but few successfully translate good intentions into a workable strategy, systematically applied to produce good results.  Learning the skills in this book can help you recognize and deal with customer turnoffs, appreciate how dissatisfied customers are actually an opportunity, and identify ways to boost customer loyalty by exceeding expectations.

Regarding Customer Satisfaction Research

The follow up to Analysis of Customer Satisfaction Data (Allen and Rao, 2000) and Linking Customer and Employee Satisfaction Data to the Bottom Line (Allen and Wilburn, 2002), this book is a must have for corporate researchers managing customer satisfaction programs. The author summarizes the history of customer satisfaction research, addresses the business problems associated with managing such research programs, and encourages businesses to shift their attention to dissatisfied and apathetic customers whose upside profit potential may be high.

Review the latest academic thoughts on consumer expectations, intentions, perceptions, experiences, opinions, attitudes and more. Use the research articles, empirical investigations and relationship theory studies contained in this journal (printed since 1988) to improve your customer loyalty research efforts.

For Sales Force Managers

Written by behavioral scientists, this book contains eye-opening insight into why people dislike sales. Part 1 contains clear diagnoses for every conceivable form of sales reluctance and Part 2 provides prescriptions to counter/remedy these impairments. The implications of this research are far-reaching.

This book contains so much practical advice about persuasive communication, prospecting, and question-based selling you will need to read it multiple times. Learn how to create interest, actively listen, overcome objections, close for commitment, stay motivated and deliver value to your customers. Example dialogues of the proper and improper application of sales techniques are found throughout this book and its follow-up (see below).

As necessary a part of your library as Volume 1, this book is full of how-to ideas and tips to help salespeople avoid mistakes and improve their skills. Art’s books are very easy to read and extremely useful.