EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE, EXCEPTIONAL PROFIT
INGHILLERI & SOLOMON
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