Excerpts

INTRODUCTION I wrote Be Your Customer's Hero for one reason: It's the book I wish I'd had during my years of owning and running retail service businesses. I'd always wanted something that showed frontline employees not just what they needed to know to be competent at customer service but what they needed to know to be great at it. I wanted a book that was easy to read and spoke realistically about the challenges they faced, that would help them take charge of their own mindset and better understand the mindset of their customers, and that would serve as both an instruction manual and a reference manual. In short, I wanted a book that would prepare my frontline employees for the difficult, unclear situations that often present themselves in the real world of customer service. Be Your Customer's Hero is that book. This book is about the reality you face at work every day, where even your best customers can be complicated, irrational, and easy to disappoint. Where you can deliver perfectly and still not meet the customer's ever-shifting expectations. Where you have policies to follow, forms that customers must sign, and problems created by departments you've never even spoken to. Where you can find yourself constrained by limited resources or facing difficult decisions because you aren't able to give the customer what she wants. And where you can sometimes find that customers are mean, are bullies, or are just plain crazy. The techniques you'll discover in this book aren't magic, but they can be magical. Much of what you'll learn is based on my own experience working with customers and customer-facing teams, and it is extremely powerful. This book is not an academic exercise; it's designed to provide you with actionable tips and tactics you can use immediately. Take what works for you; discard what doesn't. No matter your experience level, you'll find ideas and approaches that can have a major impact on how you work with customers and that will make your job infinitely easier and less stressful. Be Your Customer's Hero is designed not just to educate but to motivate. It covers frontline customer service from A to Z, from basics like smiling all the way to advanced techniques like using sales-closing tactics. If you've had any customer service training, you've likely learned some of this before. Yet there's a gap in the customer service world between what everyone knows and what they actually do. Even the best of us can fall into bad habits and need to be motivated to re-embrace the fundamentals. This book is structured in 10 parts with short chapters. Each part focuses on a single topic you can explore to make yourself a better customer-facing professional. Parts One through Three deal with the mentality of customer service; they'll help you see inside your customer's head--and your own. Parts Four through Six present the skills you need to become great at frontline service; they focus on great teamwork, customer service basics, and communication skills. Parts Seven and Eight show you how to handle difficult situations and work with nightmare customers; they explore specific techniques you can use to succeed in the most challenging circumstances. Part Nine covers customer service on the digital front lines, and in Part Ten, you'll see how you can put together everything you've learned. Excerpted from Be Your Customer's Hero: Real-World Tips and Techniques for the Service Front Lines by Adam Toporek All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.