Chip R. Bell - Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers

Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...63

Table of Contents

Praise for Take Their Breath Away

Are you bored? Were so spoiled that when something is merely good enough, we just walk away. Chip and John explain that the surefire method for growth and customer loyalty is simple: dont be boring.

Seth Godin, author, The Purple Cow and Tribes

Take Their Breath Away shows how legendary customer service delivery can win and keep devoted customers for life. I LUV this fantastic book.

Colleen Barrett, president emeritus, Southwest Airlines Company

No one knows more about creating profit through service than Chip and John. If you want to know the best way to do it, read Take Their Breath Away. The examples in this book will certainly start your creative juices flowing and help your organization take your customers breath away.

Howard Behar, president, Starbucks Coffee International, retired

Take Their Breath Away is a fun and inspiring book that provides a creative approach for achieving out of the box customer devotion.

Mike Vance, former director of Idea Development for Walt Disney Productions and dean of Disney University

Customer loyalty is at the heart of business success in the best of economic times and has even greater importance in the face of economic uncertainty. John and Chip have written the quintessential practical guide to securing profitability by serving your way to customer evangelism.

Joseph Michelli, author, The New Gold Standard

Also by Chip R. Bell

Customer Loyalty Guaranteed: Create, Lead, and Sustain, Remarkable Customer Service (with John R. Patterson)

Magnetic Service: Secrets for Creating Passionately Devoted Customers (with Bilijack R. Bell)

Service Magic: The Art of Amazing Your Customers (with Ron Zemke)

Knock Your Socks Off Service Recovery (with Ron Zemke)

Customer Love: Attracting and Keeping Customers for Life Beep Beep!: Competing in the Age of the Road Runner (with Oren Harari)

Dance Lessons: Six Steps to Great Partnerships in Business and Life (with Heather Shea)

Managers as Mentors: Building Partnerships for Learning Customers as Partners: Building Relationships that Last Managing Knock Your Socks off Service (with Ron Zemke)

Service Wisdom: Creating and Maintaining the Customer Service Edge (with Ron Zemke)

The Trainers Professional Development Handbook (with Ray Bard, Leslie Stephen, and Linda Webster)

Understanding Training: Perspectives and Practices (with Fredric Margolis)

Instructing for Results: Managing the Learning Process

(with Fredric Margolis)

Clients and Consultants (with Leonard Nadler)

Influencing: Marketing the Ideas That Matter

The Client-Consultant Handbook (with Leonard Nadler)

Also by John R. Patterson

Customer Loyalty Guaranteed: Create, Lead, and Sustain,

Remarkable Customer Service (with Chip R. Bell)

To Lisa, Bilijack, Kaylee, Annabeth, and Cassie Bell
To Jay, Molly, Carrie, Chad, and Sarah Patterson
You take our breath away!

INTRODUCTION

A Call For Imaginative Service

Customers are bored! Service providers, chastised by the less-than-exciting results of their surveys, have put all their eggs in the improvement basket. Like the well-trodden story of attempts to free the 18-wheeler truck stuck in the overpass, too many units and organizations have sought the help of a jackhammer or a welding torch; too few have simply let the air out of the truck tires.

Getting better has meant improving efficiencymaking the service experience faster, simpler, or more accurate. Service designers have typically asked, How can we satisfy our customers? rather than How can we take their breath away? How can we make what we have better? has taken precedence over What if we made it completely different? Enhancement has been about taking the next step rather than taking a completely new direction. We improve rather than invent.

The result? We hold up companies like Nordstrom, Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton Hotels, and the Container Store as exemplars. Not to say that they all dont deserve credit for elevating the standards from the mediocre levels of the 80s. But, take a closer look. These service greats focus on the customer (like remembering your preferences), design service processes around customer convenience, pay attention to service details, deliver consistency, and ensure you receive warm and friendly service. Most small-town merchants would probably say, So what! Is that not what service means in the first place? When did such stock-in-trade start getting held up as something special?

While we are sipping our pricey lattes, returning a shirt to the super gracious clerk, or getting turndown service with a personal note on the pillow, something else has been happening. We are getting way over-stimulated. Television has become both high definition and multimedia. The nightly news shows the weather report, ball scores, stock market numbers, and a crawling headline simultaneously on the TV screen. Internet servers have become a haven for colorful ads with video streaming at you while you try to concentrate on reading your e-mails. Even the Little League ballpark is cloistered among giant billboards. Hitting a home run makes a bragging sponsor as noteworthy as a budding sports star. That steady stream of sensory arousal has made a simple hotel check-in, taking Spot to the vet, or grocery shopping seem humdrum and plain vanilla.

One could argue for a slower pace and a simpler lifestyle. Instead why not enrich the clutter and harmonize the noise by offering ways to make customers laugh, reflect, swoon, or swell with pride? We have titled this book Take Their Breath Away because that is exactly the customer reaction to which customer service needs to aspire. Customers long to take from a service experience the emotional reaction they have to a golden sunset, perfect rainbow, magic trick, or poignant story. They want to be lifted beyond service that is pretty good to service that is remarkable.

This refreshingly novel brand of service leaves customers more than cheaply entertainedit leaves them richly stirred. Customers instinctively appreciate such an expression as coming from a solid intent to make a difference, not just a superficial desire to make an impression. Customers who experience such hybrid service want to return for more. They know it is rare and special; it is, in a word, imaginative.

This book does not attempt to spamize service but rather seeks to inspire and nobilize service. The path we have chosen is not the linear next step,but rather the quantum leap to a service expression that is fresh and novel. Get ready for a wild ride. The pages to follow will help you challenge conventional wisdom and upset the status quo. Want a quick taste?

As many chain hotels are struggling in the throes of me too competition and travel cutbacks, Hotel Monaco is thriving. Why? Because they deliver to the business traveler a funky, enchanting experience with goldfish in the room, leopard-skin bathrobes, foreign coins on the pillow instead of mints, and a psychic quietly reading palms in the lobby during the afternoon wine tasting. Not your cup of tea? Perhaps not. But for the market to whom the experience is targeted, it has been a winning recipe.

Next page

1234567...63

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers»

Look at similar books to Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Daniel Kooman

Breath of Life: Three Breaths that Shaped Humanity

John Burroughs

The Breath of Life

Laura Stack

The Customer Bill of Rights: The Top Four Things Customers Want

Ken Blanchard

Legendary Service

John A Larson

Capturing Loyalty: How to Measure, Generate, and Profit from Highly Satisfied Customers

Níall Ó Murchú

The Blissful Breath

Bell Chip R.

Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

Chip R. Bell

Inside Your Customers Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

Emma McBryde

Garlic Breath No More: Quick And Easy Tricks To Freshen Your Garlic Breath

Chip R Bell

Wired and Dangerous: How Your Customers Have Changed and What to Do About It

Larry Rosenberg

Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation

Chip R. Bell

Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service (Knock Your Socks Off Series)

Discussion, reviews of the book Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.