New Business Book Summary Available for Service Design for Business

Customers increasingly demand value from the services they use and expect their changing needs will be met. In Service Design for Business, Ben Reason, Lavrans Løvlie, and Melvin Brand Flu take an outside-in view of the customer lifecycle to determine the most effective means of meeting customer expectations while fulfilling business goals. They look at identifying and addressing customer pain points as well as how to guide users effectively through the service experience. The book provides a blueprint for creating responsive, agile, and customer-centric service structures that attract and retain customers from before engagement with the service to after the contract is fulfilled.

New summary available for Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

High-quality customer service is a key differentiator for many businesses, yet providing it seems to be falling down the priority list amidst cost and competitive pressures. Meanwhile, those companies that provide great service and innovate ways to keep both customers and employees happy are enjoying higher profits and lower long-term costs. These are the companies that go beyond customer satisfaction to customer loyalty. In Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service, authors Chip R. Bell and Ron Zemke show how companies can make that transition by implementing eight principles backed by both research and experience.

Delight Your Customers

What passes for good service is often simply ordinary service, with each customer treated exactly the same as the previous one. Customers receive little acknowledgement or appreciation as workers perform their tasks and move on to the next person in line. According to Steve Curtin in Delight Your Customers, this happens because organizations and their employees emphasize the mundane job functions of service work when they should instead be focusing on the true essence of the job: giving customers the best experience possible. By focusing on job essence, enterprises can empower employees to elevate overall customer service skills.

Networking: Business Talk for "Getting on with People"

Looking for meaningful networking opportunities? It is essential to focus on on in-person networking events, rather than social networking sites, as sites such as LinkedIn are simply a step or conduit to securing a face-to-face meeting.

Furthermore, sales representatives are warned to not be fooled into thinking that just because they are “connected” to hundreds of people online that they have a real relationship with those people, let alone a relationship that would lead to any sort of actual business. Alternatively, actual in-person networking with strangers can be a very worthwhile endeavor.

Not only does it pay to practice conversational skills and the ability to empathize with total strangers, but by showing genuine interest in other people, an opportunity for locating a new target or lead may materialize organically in conversation. More often than not, however, networking events are formal, structured events.

Salespeople should avoid general networking affairs and instead focus on events that include members of a specific target market. For example, Person A has a company whose services benefit lawyers. Therefore, he attends those meetings where lawyers or those who do training at law firms are sure to be in attendance.

One of the biggest benefits to networking only within target markets is that with each attendance a person can raise their profile and be noticed. Getting noticed is also why it is suggested that it is important to not just attend, but also speak, at these events. Standing up in front of one’s target market is the best way to stand out and be remembered.

This article is based on the book "How to Be Great at the Stuff You Hate." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

Focus on Your Customers – Or Die

Customer satisfaction has often been described as any company’s best asset. This is anything but a surprise, given that customers’ satisfaction with the products and services a company sells is vital.

Consumers today demand no less than the personal attention of businesses before they spend money on the products and services they sell – and even after they do buy what the companies offer, companies would be wise to do their utmost in order to sustain the relationship. The more they can keep customers coming back, the better. And of course customer satisfaction has a great deal to do with a company’s bottom line (an understatement, some would say).

As a result, customer service is moving up the priority lists of dynamic companies. They are devoting more of their time, budgets and other resources to make sure that their customers are satisfied and happy with what they have to offer.

As many a business has found out to the regret of all involved, the businesses that ignore customer relations do so at their peril. Companies have invested in their products while neglecting their customers, and have watched their customers make beelines for competitors which treat them better.

Books such as Keeping Customers Happy¸ by Jacqueline Dunckel & Brian Taylor, focus on building awareness of the importance of customer relations and learning how to improve these relationships, irrespective of the kind of business anyone is in. The authors explain the importance of customer relations and illustrate the principles of developing personalized winning plans to improve them.

Written in an easy-to-follow format, this book will help readers understand why customer service is increasingly becoming important for dynamic companies, as well as how to improve this experience for their customers and keep them coming back for more.