Perfect Phrases For Customer Service - Preface

The following is the Preface from Perfect Phrases For Customer Service, by Robert Bacal (McGraw-Hill). For complete information about this groundbreaking book on customer service click here. From there you can browse excerpts and the Table of Contents.

I want to share a little known secret about the value of delivering good service to customers. Yes, it’s good for business and the organization. Yes, you may derive a lot of satisfaction by doing a customer service job well. No question. But what’s the most compelling reason to learn about, and deliver good customer service? It’s this. When you deliver good customer service to your customers, you experience less stress, and less hassle and grief from customers. They argue less. They’re much less likely to insult, and they’re less demanding. They don’t threaten you when they get upset (I’ll have your job!”).

You can save huge amounts of time. One dissatisfied customer may take up to ten or twenty times more of your time than a satisfied one.And the time spent with the dissatisfied customer is usually not all that much fun. Customer service skills help you keep your happy customers happy, help prevent customers from becoming unhappy and taking out their frustrations on you, and help you deal effectively and quickly with customers who are upset and unhappy.

This book is gives you the tools to interact with customers more effectively, so that the company, the customer, and you, the person dealing with the customer, all benefit. It’s a different kind of book about customer service. It’s not full of principles or platitudes, or handy customer service slogans. It focuses on doing. What should you do with a customer who is swearing at you? What do you do to prevent customers who have waited a long time from getting really angry? What do you do to provide advice to customers so it will be heard and appreciated? This book will answer these questions, and many other ones about customer service situations—specifically and precisely.This book is about solutions.

Organization

Part One of this book has two chapters. In Chapter 1,we’ll cover some basics of customer service, so you can increase your understanding of what customers want from you, and the things that cause customers to hit the roof. We’ll also talk about various types of customers (internal, external, paying and non-paying), and we’ll explain how you can best use this book.

Chapter 2 describes dozens of very specific customer service techniques. The explanations will help you decide when to use what techniques and in what customer situations. The pages in that part of the book are shaded black so you can easily refer to them for specific techniques,which are given in alphabetical order.

Part Two, and the most important, covers 60 common and not-so-common customer service situations and tells you specifically how you can deal with them. I do this by: describing the situation, listing the techniques to use in this situation, presenting a dialogue to show you exactly what to say and
do, explaining the reasoning behind the use of the techniques, and providing a few hints and tips to help you use the techniques properly.

Even if we have not included all of the situations you deal with on the job, you will be able to extrapolate the examples to other situations you do face. I think that regardless of whether you work in retail, the hospitality industry, government, or as a call-in customer service rep, the situations covered in this part will be very useful to you.

Conclusion

Far too much customer service training and far too many customer service books tell you only what you already know. Do you really need to be told again that you should smile? Or shake hands? No. But you might find it useful to know when it’s a bad idea to smile at a customer?

You’ll learn that from this book.

So, here’s the bottom line about this book: you may come across a few things you already know. But you’ll also come across a number of techniques you probably haven’t thought about. If you work at using these techniques properly, and focus on doing things differently with customers, you are going to be better at your job, be clearly better at customer service than others who don’t understand these techniques, and help your employer and yourself be more successful. And along the way, save yourself a lot of hassle and a lot of grief.

More Information

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Table of Contents (view skills covered)
Table of Contents (view customer situations covered)
Free Excerpt - Book Preface
Free Excerpt - Situation #1
Free Excerpt - Situation #2

This book (upon release in late 2004) will be available at your local bookstore, or through amazon.com and other booksellers. Here's the info:

Perfect Phrases For Customer Service, By Robert Bacal
# Paperback: 175 pages
# Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (December 24, 2004)
# ISBN: 007144453X