Customer Service Book Reviews

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.

Robert Bacal, Perfect Phrases for Customer Service (McGraw-Hill, 2005)

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.

Health Care Advisory Board, Hardwiring for Service Excellence
(The Advisory Board Company, 1999)

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.

Chris Denove and James D. Power IV, Satisfaction (Portfolio, 2006)

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.

Paul R. Timm, Customer Service Career Success Through
Customer Satisfaction (Pearson Education, Inc., 2005)