Customer Reviews

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization

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Length:: 8:45 Mins

Author and customer service speaker Micah Solomon's keynote speech to the NCBS Retail Banking Conference at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas (8 minute excerpt): This Customer Service Keynote is an introduction to the principles inExceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization's principles. (8 minute excerpt)

This keynote speech was filmed in front of an audience of bankers at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas in June 2011.

{More live speaking excerpts and info available at customerserviceguru DOT com}

When I saw EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE, EXCEPTIONAL PROFIT (AMACOM) by Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon, I thought to myself, "Oh, no, still another book on customer service." Even the subtitle. THE SECRETS OF BUILDING A FIVE-STAR CUSTOMER SERVICE ORGANIZATION, indicated that might be the case.

But was I ever wrong! The authors immediately got me interested in finding out more through their use of success stories from such companies as The Ritz-Carlton and Lexus, as well as how the principles were applied by such online firms as Netflix and CD Baby.

In addition, they quickly got me thinking about how to make customers more loyal--with one key way being the need to provide anticipatory service vs. merely reacting to customers.

Some of their examples, though seemingly basic, blew me away--such as this one:
*To help launch their Ritz-Carlton luxury hotel brand, initially, founding President and Chief Operating Officer Horst Schulze and his team decided on a set of ideal phrases for use in conversation with customers, then trained employees to use those phrases. The frequent use of certain phrases helped unify their employees around a shared identity and contributed to a distinctive "Ritz style" that the public could easily recognize: phrases like "my pleasure," "Right away," "Certainly," and -a personal favorite-"We're fully committed tonight." (Translation: "We're booked solid, bub!" The list of words and phrases to be avoided included folks, hey, you guys, and okay.

I also loved this technique for how to preemptively unwad your staff's shorts:
* When your own employees first hear you taking the customer's side, don't expect them to be thrilled. ("Does my boss blame me? Does she actually believe that idiot's version of what happened?") You need to explain that it's often necessary to empathize with and even amplify the customer's side of the story. Explain that the customer may or may not be right in an objective sense. Regardless, you're going to be disproportionately sympathetic to the customer's viewpoint because the customer is your boss-the customer pays your paycheck, along with the paychecks of everyone in the company.

Human nature being what it is, this explanation will bear repeating. Often.

Lastly, I often wonder why more companies don't utilize this technique:
* Even in a mundane situation, this simple understanding, starting from day one, can make all the difference. Have you ever been to a shopping mall and stared, obviously bewildered at the map-while a security guard idly stands there "protecting" you, all of two feet away? Did the security guard proactively help you out with an "Anything I can help you find?" If he worked for us, he would have. At orientation, we would have started him off understanding his higher purpose: to create a great shopping experience for guests. Sure, that could include deterring and apprehending bad guys, but it also includes attending to shoppers who have that unmistakable lost look on their faces.

Even as I type the above, I realize that EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE, EXCEPTIONAL PROFIT is a book that I'm going to want to revisit. If you read it, you'll become as convinced as I am that Ingehilleri and Solomon have ideas that can be applied to virtually any company or organization--including yours.

What Apple is to innovation and Rolex is to quality Ritz-Carlton is to service. Consider the luxury hotel chain's famous $2,000 customer-satisfaction pledge. This remarkable program, now in place for decades, allows any Ritz-Carlton employee, regardless of rank, to decide alone to spend up to $2,000 to resolve any customer problem. To date, no Ritz-Carlton employee has felt it necessary to spend the full amount on behalf of a customer, but many take creative action to address problems promptly. This policy sends a powerful signal to Ritz-Carlton clients and employees about how much the company values quality and service. In their book, service experts Micah Solomon and Leonardo Inghilleri teach you how to plan and implement an exceptional service program. getAbstract cheers this nicely written book. It is a pleasure to read and it explains exceptional service clearly.

Customer service is an important element for any successful small business. It also can be a bit of a struggle at times, especially when hiring new people and expecting them to give the same attention to detail as you do. Further, many companies pride themselves on good customer service, but do little to systematize it and really turn it into something special. Enter Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon, customer service trailblazers and co-authors of the book Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit.

From the book: "The magic happens when you, your systems, and the employees throughout the ranks of your business anticipate the needs of your customers, learning to recognize and respond to the needs of your customers before they are expressed - sometimes before your customers even realize they have a need. That is the difference between providing ho-hum service by merely reacting to customer requests and building loyalty through true anticipatory service."

This book focuses on one key area of your business, your customer service. No matter how good you think you are doing it right now, you owe it to yourself to read this book. Leonardo and Micah have both separately built amazing businesses based around customer service, Leonardo in the hotel industry and Micah in the music industry. They know what they are talking about when it comes to providing good customer service. Even better, they are really good at showing you how you can improve your own service levels.

When it comes to providing exceptional service, every little thing matters. As overwhelming as this may sound, this book provides some pretty good frameworks for systems you can put in place to make sure each detail is covered. Beyond the systems, you need to focus on hiring the right people and getting employees on the same page when it comes to treating the customer right. Every single employee who might have an interaction with a customer should understand the stakes.

The authors also point out that, while every interaction is important, there are three main areas to focus on if you want to make a big impact. The first area is how you handle an issue, or what they call a service failure. When you have a customer upset because something goes wrong, it is not enough to just restore the situation back to what it should have been in the first place. Fixing an issue is a chance for you to shine, and turn an upset customer into a loyal fan. Putting extraordinary effort into recovering from mistakes will go a long way toward making your customers love you.

The other two areas of high importance are your hello and your goodbye. The first interaction with the customer and the last will often stand out in their mind. A warm and personal hello sets the stage for a great customer experience. A caring good bye seals the deal.

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit will challenge the norms you have accepted for customer service. You will likely see some ways that you can improve, and this book will both inspire you and show you how to do it. In a business world that is being made more personal by things like social media, and with the internet making it much easier for customers to choose from multiple competitors, you need to make sure the customer is king at your business.

Who This Book is For:

Any business who deals with customers on any level (in other words, every business, including internet businesses that don't have a lot of "face-to-face" interaction with customers)

Business owners who want to hire employees who will care about customers as much as they do

Customer service managers and employees

Businesses who pride themselves on customer service

Businesses looking to create more loyal customers

Length:: 2:16 Mins

April Book Review from SBC Fulfillment Blog: [...]
Background: I added this book to my Amazon wish list, which in turn posts to my FriendFeed account. Micah Solomon found my post on Friend Feed and sent me an advance (signed) copy, pretty "exceptional service." Micah is the small business guy who founded Oasis Disc Manufacturing. Leonardo is best known for his work with the Ritz Carlton.

Main Points: The main points I took away from the book can be summed up in language, anticipation, and tracking.

Language: The need to be intentional about the language you and your employees use. This includes words to use, not use, and words that are "banned."

Anticipate: Exceptional customer service comes from anticipating your customer's needs. Anyone can hand a towel to a customer who asks for one, but an "exceptional company" hands you one before you have the chance to ask.

Measure: You NEED a system to track your customers likes and dislikes. Additionally, you can track top problem for continuous improvement programs.
Take Away: Your customer service program must be intentional and must incorporate training that constantly reinforces your program.

Conclusion: Great advice from some world class companies. The pages contain golden nuggets for companies big and small (like mine). My only criticism is I would like to see more case studies. Overall this book is a must read. Highly recommended.

Great book. As we all know, it's more profitable to have a returning customer than it is to go find a new one. This book has some great ideas on how to give an exceptional experience to your customer so you not only get him to return for more, but also tell his friends. With so much noise in the marketplace, building loyalty like this can really make the difference in whether your company survives or thrives...or not.

This book is very practical. However, putting some of these changes in place may seem like a challenge and make you wonder how you'll be able to do it, even with the very clear methods, many of which you'll be able to put into use immediately. The trick, in my opinion, is to get new employees using this stuff from the moment they come in. That's what I'm already doing with my latest hire and it's working fabulously.

If you enjoy Seth Godin style books, you'll like this one.

I get asked to recommend business books often enough that I developed a core list of titles a few years ago that I felt best covered the critical business subjects of our day. It's a pretty short list, yet I've been content with the depth and breadth of my choices. But now, I am impressed with this new book, Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization to the point of adding it to my recommended list.

It has become clear to me lately that customer service, or more generally, the "customer experience," is becoming more and more of a place where a business can define itself in the contemporary business world. And by far the most engaging book I've seen on this subject is Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit.

It would be a shame for a business leader to waste his or her time re-inventing this stuff when the authors spell everything out so clearly for you in this volume:
--They teach you how to actually find out what your customers are thinking--and how to stop alienating them.
-- They teach you how to write and implement meaningful, useful,"they'll want to fill them out and you'll want-to-read them" surveys of your customers.
--They teach you how--and when--to hire.
--They show you how to run powerful, even life-changing, employee orientations.
--They explain in passionate detail how to support your workers.
...and dozens of other topics that are just about as important.

And, if you're *not* up for a total overhaul of your organization, they throw you several relatively easy, nitty-gritty shortcuts that you can start on today.

(The authors even reprint for you in the appendix the actual internal cards and handouts they use to ensure customer service standards in their existing, massively successful, businesses--probably worth more themselves than the cost of the book.) A nice touch.

A noteworthy difference between this book and the other customer service books I've seen is that this is written by two high-level, still-active businessmen wanting to distill and spread their ideas -- instead of by outside consultants reviewing businesses they think are kind of cool (like so many of the other similar titles I've come across). These lessons were learned on the inside, and are presented by the authors because they know that they work (or are admitted, with amusing candor, where they don't). And the author's businesses are pretty phenomenal examples: The Ritz-Carlton during the period when both of the Malcolm Baldrige awards were won -- an achievement that I don't believe any other service business has ever matched, and Micah Solomon's Oasis Disc Manufacturing, one of the best-loved of companies in the independent entertainment industry, as is often discussed in Seth Godin's blog, in his book Purple Cow, and his ebooks.

Like one of the reviewers above, I was struck by the *variety* of big name endorsements this book got:
--"new work" pundit Daniel Pink ("Drive," etc.)
-- old-school customer service and management writer Ken Blanchard ("Raving Fans," "One Minute Manager," etc.)
-- cyber-guru Seth Godin (who also writes about "Exceptional Service" co-author Micah Solomon in his blog sometimes)
-- Ritz-Carlton creator Horst Schulze (who also was apparently generally involved with and gave his blessing to this project)

Now that I've spent a week reading and trying out the concepts in this book, I understand why these people from different but overlapping backgrounds all appreciated this book. Most other books on this subject (and I must have read a dozen) either tread dangerously close to a silly "smile, smile smile" philosophy lacking any hard dose of facts (try finding specific actionable data on how to survey your customers in some of the self-promotion-minded schlock out there), or -- just as bad -- lack any philosophical backbone at all when it comes to talking about how to hire, encourage, and lead your all-important employees.

This book, on the other hand, stays entirely away from stuff that only SHOULD work, and sticks to stuff that DOES work--over and over, in the experience of the authors and in businesses they are close to. Plus, it is impassioned when it comes to philosophy: the philosophy that has been behind a string of successful businesses for both of the writers.

Furthermore, a dirty little secret of most of the customer service books out there is that they really don't address the realities of the Internet--unless those books are *exclusively* about the Internet (in which case the writing tends to exceedingly blow). This book, on the other hand, truly does tackle Internet customer service in a useful manner--both as an entity unto itself (with superpowers which must be respected) and as an entity which needs to respect the humanity of its users, just as is needed in the world of terrestrial-based commerce. This book handles these issues masterfully, presumably due to Solomon's involvement (making excellent use of quotations from Seth Godin and some neat and surprising examples from businesses ranging from Netflix to a humble and hypothetical carpet-cleaning startup).

Another quick note: these guys can actually write. And in my experience, the better a business book is written, with carefully crafted sentences and paragraphs and well-organized pages, the better the concepts can be retained--and referred back to.

Of all the books I've bought on improving relations with customers, Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit is the most useful I've come across so far. Frankly, it's one of the most useful, period, on how to improve my business in general: profit-wise and sustainability-wise. I think you'll have the same impression.

I am a marketing professor at a mid-size university; I assigned Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit to my students as the required text for my services marketing class. Before becoming an academic, I worked in the service industry; also I research in this area. When searching for a text, I read several popular press books and this was by far the best. Of course you can never tell how students will react. I had my students rate the book and it received a few four star ratings (just because they thought a five had to be "perfect" and nothing is perfect) the rest gave it five stars; no small feat as the students had no choice in the selection of the book. The students noted the book was well written, topics were clearly explained, and contained examples they could relate to. My students not only read the book, but several recommended it to their employers. The engineer on the ladder and the Italiain Grandmother were class favorites. Students were impressed that the authors supplied their contact information and amazed when Micah Solomon responded to a question in less than 2 hours. I am planning to break with tradition, instead of changing books as I have done each previous semester Exception Service, Exceptional Profit will remain my required text.

EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE EXCEPTIONAL PROFIT is a book for anyone in business. I know that sounds too all-encompassing, but this book is a great read because of its simplicity, practical suggestions and applicable examples. It will be a wonderful resource for anyone who is either starting their business, or wants to improve customer loyalty.

As someone who has worked at four- and five-diamond hotels for over 22 years--including a significant portion of that time in guest relations/customer service and as Director of Training, I am well aware of the importance of excellent customer service. Yet, even with this point of reference I gained extensive useful information from this book which offers simple, insightful and practical advice on how to enhance customer service, and help build and strengthen customer loyalty.

In this current era of IM-ing and texting, chapter three about Language engineering really resonated with me. It outlined how simple use of the "right" words can help change the tone and perception of messages sent--by creating verbiage that is positive and helpful.

This is especially valuable to me with my new business that has an online presence. I will probably never meet most of my customers in person, so I especially enjoyed the practical advice in chapter 10 about building customer loyalty online.

This book also expands on other great concepts that contribute to customer loyalty like chapter six--about building anticipation into products and services---which is especially useful in a new business.

I don't normally provide reviews and online feedback. In fact, this is my first. But I gained some valuable gems about how to make service exceptional, and I strongly feel I would recommend this book to anyone who is willing to listen---and is open to learning simple ways to provide exceptional service and build stronger customer loyalty.