590 Customer Service Videos, Articles, Books

Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business

By Danny Meyer Owner of Shake Shack

In this landmark book, Danny shares the lessons he's learned while developing the winning recipe for doing the business he calls "enlightened hospitality." This innovative philosophy emphasizes putting the power of hospitality to work in a new and counterintuitive way: The first and most important application of hospitality is to the people who work for you, and then, in descending order of priority, to the guests, the community, the suppliers, and the investors. This way of prioritizing stands the more traditional business models on their heads, but Danny considers it the foundation of every success that he and his restaurants have achieved.

The Amazement Revolution: Seven Customer Service Strategies to Create an Amazing Customer (and Employee)

By Shep Hyken

Authored by customer service thought leader Shep Hyken, this book offers seven practical strategies to improve customer happiness and loyalty, including cultivating partnership with customers, providing unique membership awards, and building community with customers.

This book is all steak and no sizzle, with tons of practical ideas and strategies supported by real-world examples that readers can take into work with them as soon as they read.

What Customers Crave: How to Create Relevant and Memorable Experiences at Every Touchpoint

By Nicholas Webb

Author Nicholas Webb has some things to say about the current state of customer experience: "Let's face it: Today, most customer experience programs are a disaster."

Webb thinks only businesses that offer "optimal" customer service will survive -- and that most businesses are a long way off from achieving that. The main reason, Webb argues, is because the technological innovations of the last few decades have made it easier for businesses to treat and review customers like data points, instead of treating them like real people.

Webb calls for reviewing each touchpoint a customer shares with your business, and evaluating what you can do, both online and offline, to improve each step of that experience. Optimizing each stage of the customer experience, instead of making broad-strokes changes, will satisfy individualistic customers who won't be satisfied by the bare minimum.

Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer Driven Growth Engine

By Jeanne Bliss

Author Jeanne Bliss is a thought leader on the role of customer leadership -- like the Chief Customer Officer, for example. Her book outlines the five competencies she uses to evaluate and coach customer-driven executives to turn customers into a growth engine -- but they're useful principles to use as guiding north stars, no matter what stage of your career:

• Honor and manage your customers as assets
• Align around customer experience
• Build a customer listening path
• Proactive experience reliability and innovation
• Leadership, accountability, and culture

Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service (A Disney Institute Book)

With Theodore Kinni

Exceeding expectations rather than simply satisfying them is the cornerstone of the Disney approach to customer service. Now, in honor of the tenth anniversary of the original Be Our Guest, the Disney Institute, which specializes in helping professionals see new possibilities through concepts not found in the typical workplace, is revealing even more of the business behind the magic of quality service. During the last twenty-five years, thousands of professionals from more than thirty-five countries and more than forty industries have attended business programs at Disney Institute and learned how to adapt the Disney approach for their own organizations.

The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company

By Joseph A. Michelli

When it comes to refined service and exquisite hospitality, one name stands high above the rest: The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. With ceaseless attention to every luxurious detail, the company has set the bar for creating memorable customer experiences in world-class settings. Now, for the first time, the leadership secrets behind the company's extraordinary success are revealed.

The New Gold Standard takes you on an exclusive tour behind the scenes of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Granted unprecedented access to the company's executives, staff, and its award-winning Leadership Center training facilities, bestselling author Joseph Michelli explored every level of leadership within the organization. He emerged with the key principles leaders at any company can use to provide a customer experience unlike any other, such as:

• Understanding the ever-evolving needs of customers
• Empowering employees by treating them with the utmost respect
• Anticipating customers' unexpressed needs and concerns
• Developing and conducting an unsurpassed training regimen

Sharing engaging stories from the company's employees--from the corporate office and hotels around the globe--Michelli describes the innovative methods the company uses to create peerless guest experiences and explains how it constantly hones and improves them.

The New Gold Standard weaves practical how-to advice, proven leadership tools, and the wisdom of experts to help you create and embed superior customer-service principles, processes, and practices in your own organization.