Be Your Customer's Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines: Real-World Tips and Techniques for the Service Front Lines - Softcover

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ADAM TOPOREK is a customer experience strategist and founder of CTS Service Solutions, a consultancy that provides organizations with real-world, customer-centric solutions through workshops and training. He authors the popular blog Customers that Stick.

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“In Be Your Customer’s Hero, Adam Toporek tackles not just the theory of customer service strategy, but the day-to-day actions that can truly elevate the experience for customers and employees alike. Adam’s on-the-ground experience provides perspective missing in most service playbooks today. This is a great book for any leader in an organization with customers.” — Jeannie Walters, CEO, 360Connext, and Co-host, Crack the Customer Code

Confident. In Control. Successful.

Is this how you feel when you work with customers? If you answered “no,” you’re not alone. Customer service can be incredibly difficult. Even the best customers can be quirky and hard to please, and the worst customers—well, don’t even get us started.

With the right mindset and skills, however, customer service can be easier. In Be Your Customer’s Hero, Adam Toporek gives you a playbook to succeed in any customer-facing role. You will learn more than 80 concepts and techniques, including how to . . .

• Direct your focus where it gets results

• Understand why customers behave the way they do

• Redirect difficult conversations with just one move

• Stand your ground without upsetting customers further

• Resolve virtually any customer service issue with a proven process

You’ll also learn these powerful tips:

• 7 service triggers you must avoid

• 10 power words that supercharge your customer communication

• 13 go-to tactics for defusing angry customers

Be Your Customer’s Hero is the single resource that can help you gain confidence, be in control, and become successful on the front lines of customer service.

ADAM TOPOREK is a customer experience strategist and founder of CTS Service Solutions, a consultancy that provides organizations with real-world, customer-centric solutions through workshops and training. He authors the popular blog Customers That Stick™.

Twitter@adamtoporek

Website and blog: www.customersthatstick.com

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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.