Renee Evenson - Powerful Phrases for Effective Customer Service: Over 700 Ready-to-Use Phrases and Scripts That Really Get Results

I ve spent my entire career in customer service management and over ten years writing about how to provide exceptional customer service. One of my books, Customer Service Training 101, 2nd edition, offers detailed training to equip you with the necessary tools to handle your customers well. But as a customer service expert, I also understand that frontline employees have to handle many situations that are far from ideal and that cant all be covered in a training bookscenarios that leave you scrambling to know what to say and do. Lets face it: Working in the customer service field is not easy!

What happens when you deal with customers who are demanding, rude, angry, overly analytical, overly friendly, or even intoxicated or mentally unstable? Any of these behaviors can have you searching for the right words to say and the right actions to take. Your training often eludes you when you need it most! When you deal with customers who demand unrealistic outcomes, are combative, call you names, yell, butt in while youre helping another customer, blame you for something you didnt do, or are agitated, youre likely to stumble as you attempt to regroup, recover, and move on. As a service pro vider, its your job to give great service to every one of your customers but you know its often difficult to achieve. And, sometimes, it isnt the customer who behaves badly.

What happens when you inadvertently say or do something that causes a customer to become upset or angry? Perhaps you said something patronizing, sarcastic, tactless, or embarrassing. You realize your blunder and wish you could take back the remark, but you cant. So you dont say anything. Or you say something that makes the situation worse. And what about those situations in which you have no clue what the customer is talking about, or perhaps you were distracted and didnt listen to your customer? You wish you knew what to say to get back on track, but you dont say anything, hoping youll figure out how to handle the interaction.

Its because of these less than ideal situations that I wrote this book. What if you developed the skills and knew the right words to say to handle any challenging behavior or situation and get the customer on your side? This would enable you to complete the interaction by finding the best solution to the situation quickly, correctly, and with a great attitude. What if you developed the skills to quickly recover when youve made a blunder with a customer? What if you knew the right words to say to diffuse any situation and maintain control of the conversation? Powerful Phrases for Effective Customer Service provides the necessary tools to do all that. It includes over 700 phrases and scripts that youll be able to put to use in your work environment and that will give you the ability to effectively handle 30 different challenging customer behaviors and 20 challenging employee situations.

, Powerful Phrases + Actions = Successful Customer Interactions, focuses on two critical components of service: the value of using powerful phrases that communicate welcome, courtesy, rapport, enthusiasm, assurance, empathy, regret, and appreciation, and the im portance of backing up your words with appropriate actions. These chapters will give you the ammunition to develop the skills and form the habit of incorporating powerful phrases and actions into your daily interactions with customers.

, Powerful Phrases and Scripts for Every Situation, first focuses on the basics of typical customer interactions. Youll learn the six steps to interacting with your customers successfully. Once you learn these steps, youre ready to get to the gist of this book: learning the powerful phrases and scripts for handling challenging customer behaviors and challenging employee situations. Youll learn how to identify the behavior or situation, read a Do This! scenario that reinforces the correct method for dealing with it, and get an explanation of Why This Works. Youll learn how to apply the approach to your particular work environment and your customers. Youll even learn how to effectively interact with customers who post comments, complaints, or compliments on social media sites.

This is the book youll keep handy. Its the book youll turn to when you need to know how to work with a challenging customer. Its the book youll use when you realize youve said or done something wrong and need to know how to conduct yourself differently in the future. Its the book that will give you the confidence to handle any type of customer behavior and any situation that may have previously caused you to stumble. Its the book that will help you deal not only with customers, but also with vendors, suppliers, potential customers, coworkers, upper management, and your competition. Any time you enter into a give and take interaction, the person youre speaking to can be considered your customer, even if that person is a family member or a friend. Powerful Phrases for Effective Customer Service is the book that will give you the tools you need to conduct yourself well in any interaction.