The one-sentence summary:

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

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

ELEMENTS OF THE BOOK I PARTICULARLY LIKE

• If you work in a service industry you can take the examples and apply them.

• For example, there are five important elements in delivering brilliant service (see tools):
  • Selecting, training and inspiring loyalty virtuosos at all levels
  • Handling service breakdowns in a systematic way that makes customers more loyal than if the mishap hadn’t happened
  • Gathering and using customer preference data
  • Ensuring you meet customers’ timeliness and quality expectations
  • Personalising the experience of online customers

• The four main elements of customer satisfaction are (see tools):
  • Perfect product
  • Caring delivery
  • Timeliness
  • Effective problem resolution process

• The four steps to great service recovery are (see tools):
  • Apologize
  • Review the complaint with the customer
  • Fix the problem and follow up
  • Document it to stop it happening again