Synopses & Reviews
Taking exceptional care of the customers who keep you in business has never been more important. And now the team behind the best-selling Knock Your Socks Off Service® series makes building outstanding customer service skills and attitudes both easy and fun with 101 Activities for Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service.
Inside you’ll find role-plays, word games, brainstorming exercises, secret shopping trips, and more to help your team learn by doing and sharing. Most of the activities take 30 minutes or less—quick enough to liven up any brown-bag lunch seminar or routine staff meeting. While working and laughing with your team, you’ll all get a chance to see things from the customer’s perspective…and create an action plan for service improvement. In the process you’ll quickly grasp core service principles and feel comfortable handling real-world service challenges such as:
• Making only promises you can keep
• Treating customers with empathy, not sympathy
• Really listening to and learning from customer feedback
• Knowing when it’s all right and pays off to say “I’m sorry”
• Calming obnoxious customers and coping with on-the-job stress
Giving you the practical tools you need to wow your customers, these simple but powerful activities will help all front-line service professionals deliver consistently excellent results.
Praise for The Original Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service:
“Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service is written in a witty, engaging style, and offers real tactics any service provider can use. Once you’ve read this book, pass it on to your employees.” — Entrepreneur
“Leave it to crafty Ron Zemke to find a niche that still needs filling. Yes, management books on customer service are indeed a glut on the market, but what about a book for the poor front-line grunts who actually have to serve those customers Enter Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service.” — Training
“They attack the issue with missionary zeal and, instead of pronouncing the ‘thou shalt’ type of commandments, offer practical how-to-fix-it advice and render outstanding service tips.” — ALA Booklist
Performance Research Associates, Inc., is a consulting firm specializing in creating a customer-driven culture. Carrying on the legacy of the late service legend Ron Zemke, PRA principals Ann Thomas and Jill Applegate are part of a team that has authored more than 40 books and thousands of articles, as well as developed numerous seminars and organizational assessment instruments. The firm works with companies of all sizes and sectors around the globe, and is headquartered in Minneapolis.
Synopsis
The latest addition to the best-selling Knock Your Socks Off Service(R) series, 101 Activities for Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service teaches customer service professionals valuable ways to help their organizations provide world-class service. These simple but effective activities take only minutes, but deliver truly powerful, lasting results.
Synopsis
From the bestselling Knock Your Socks Off Service series, this valuable tool book includes a plethora of fast and effective activities that teach customer service professionals how to provide world-class service.
Synopsis
The latest addition to the bestselling Knock Your Socks Off Service series, this book provides you with the practical tools and cost-effective training required to meet their customers' needs.
Today's customers are demanding service that is faster, better, and more personalized than ever before. How can organizations ensure that they are prepared to meet that challenge? Written in the same accessible and humorous style that made Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service so popular, this companion guide takes the unique position of seeing things from the customer's perspective--providing a collection of fun, fast, and enlightening exercises to teach customer service managers and employees valuable ways to help their organizations provide top-notch service.
In 101 Activities for Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service, you'll discover how to create an action plan for improvement, reviewing topics such as:
- how to say no,
- empathy vs. sympathy,
- service recovery,
- listening,
- email and telephone skills,
- customers from hell,
- winning words and soothing phrases,
- and anticipating customer needs.
This invaluable resource also gives you information on building reliability, customer feedback, keeping a stress log, and more. These simple but effective activities take only minutes, but deliver truly powerful, lasting results.
Synopsis
Today’s customers are demanding service that is faster, better, and more personalized than ever before. How can organizations ensure that they are prepared to meet that challenge? The latest addition to the best-selling Knock Your Socks Off Service® series, 101 Activities for Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service provides readers with the practical tools and cost-effective training required to help meet their customers’ needs.
Taking the unique position of seeing things from the customer’s perspective, this collection of fun and enlightening exercises teaches customer service managers and employees valuable ways to help their organizations provide world-class service, and helps them create an action plan for improvement. Written in the same accessible and humorous style that made Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service so popular, this companion guide covers such topics as:
• how to say no
• empathy vs. sympathy
• service recovery
• listening
• email
• telephone skills
• customers from hell
• winning words and soothing phrases
• anticipating customer needs
• building reliability
• customer feedback
• keeping a stress log
• and more
These simple but effective activities take only minutes, but deliver truly powerful, lasting results.
About the Author
Ann Thomas and Jill Applegate of Performance Research Associates, Inc. (Minneapolis, MN) carry on the legacy begun in 1972 by the late service legend, Ron Zemke. The firm consults with corporations and nonprofits of all sizes around the globe.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Our Thanks
Introduction: About This Book
SECTION ONE
The Fundamentals of Knock Your Socks Off Service
1 What Customers Want, What Customers Expect
2 Who’s Your Customer?
3 Knock Your Socks Off Service
4 Customers’ Ever-Changing Needs
5 The RATER Factors
6 How Do I RATE?
7 The Value of Reliability
8 Reliability: Promises, Promises
9 Reliability: Secret Shopper
10 Assurance: The Language of Competence
11 Assurance: The Knowledge Game
12 Assurance: Secret Shopper
13 Tangibles: Take a Field Trip
14 Tangibles: Sensory Perception
15 Tangibles: Customer Feedback
16 Tangibles: Secret Shopper
17 Empathy vs. Sympathy
18 Empathy: Building a Statement
19 Empathy: Scripting Tough Situations
20 Empathy: Partnering for Practice
21 Responsiveness: Identifying the Barriers
22 Responsiveness: Proactive vs. Reactive
23 Responsiveness: Role-Play
24 RATER Self-Assessment
25 The Ten Deadly Sins of Service
26 The Customer Is Always.. . the Customer
27 Educating Your Customer
28 Filling the Knowledge Gap
SECTION TWO
The How-To’s of Knock Your Socks Off Service
29 Good Question: Honesty
30 Identify the Rules: Red Rules/Blue Rules
31 Making Exceptions
32 Why Customers Don’t Trust
33 Create an Environment of Trust
34 Barriers to Effective Listening
35 Go Ahead, I’m Listening
36 Follow My Lead
37 Listening: Taking a Mental Detour
38 Crafting the Best Questions
39 The Name Game
40 Who Knows?
41 How Did I Do?
42 When Questions Go Wrong
43 Winning Words and Soothing Phrases
44 Scripting Better Responses
45 Give a Nonverbal Cue!
46 Face-to-Face Charades
47 Receiving Nonverbal Cues
48 Telephone Checklist
49 Be a Standout on the Phone
50 Just Phone Home!
51 Telephone Etiquette: Secret Shopper
52 Tongue Twisters with a Twist
53 E-Mail vs.Telephone
54 Written Communication Review
55 Practice E-Mail Communications
56 E-Mail Etiquette
57 Communication Sensitivity
58 It’s a Small World
59 The Generational Divide
60 Generations at Work
61 Saying “No,” Positively
SECTION THREE
Seamless Knock Your Socks Off Service
62 Communicating Across Functions
63 Hitting the Target
64 Visit an Internal Customer
65 It’s Not My Job
66 Mindbenders
67 It’s All About Kindness
68 Details, Details, Details
69 Creating a Cycle of Service
70 Analyzing Moments of Truth
71 Details That Make a Difference
72 Value-Added Service
73 Good Selling Is Good Service
74 So Many People to Thank
75 Making “Thank You” Personal
76 Thank-You Round Robin
SECTION FOUR
The Problem-Solving Side of Knock Your Socks Off Service
77 The Service Recovery Process
78 How Ready Are You to Recover?
79 Using the Well-Placed “I’m Sorry”
80 Finding the Right Fix
81 Putting Recovery Knowledge into Action
82 Tell Me a Story
83 Make Customers Your Partners in Problem Solving
84 Maximize Your Web Site Impact
85 Matching Atonement to the Error
86 Fix the Customer First, Then the Problem
87 Fix the Customer Role-Play
88 Calming Obnoxious Customers
89 Customers From Hell® Hall of Shame
90 Difficult Customer Match Game
91 A Question of Control
SECTION FIVE
Knock Your Socks Off Fitness
92 Stress Reducers
93 Create a Stress Log
94 Coping with Change
95 The Web of Support
96 The Power of Positive Talk
97 Keep It Professional
98 Learning Assessment
99 The Power of Curiosity
100 For All You Do, This Note’s For You
101 What’s Important to Me?
Credits
Index
About the Authors