Customer Care Excellence: How to Create an Effective Customer Focus: Create an Effective Customer Service Strategy (Professional Paperbacks) [Paperback]

"This book offers useful advice on maintaining loyalty within an ever more sophisticated and demanding customer base. Informative and useful for anybody involved in customer relations." Business Age

"This is certainly a classic…suggests that by outstanding service, and building better relationships with customers, companies will reap rewards."

As competitiveness increases, many organisations have realised that they cannot compete on price alone and have developed strategies for providing superior customer service. In Customer Care Excellence Sarah Cook provides a comprehensive action plan.

Today's consumers are sophisticated, well-informed and have high expectations of the services they want to receive. Companies that do not face up to these changes will lose market share. The fourth edition of this title recognizes these trends and demonstrates, in a practical way, how to develop and sustain a customer-service focus. Emphasis is placed on the importance of the strategic aspects of customer care - gaining commitment, listening to customers, developing a customer-care ethos and staff motivation - in ensuring successful results. The volume also explains how to deliver an excellent service at the front line, covering personal service, speed of delivery and service recovery.

Sarah Cook is Managing Director of the Stairway Consultancy, customer service specialists. She is the author of The Essential Guide to Employee Engagement, Change Management Excellence, Customer Care Excellence and Practical Benchmarking, all published by Kogan Page.

1. An Introduction to Customer Care

Service in a competitive environment

The changing nature of customer service

Changing customer behaviour and expectation

Customer retention

What is excellent service?

Personal versus material service

Embracing change

Contact centres

The Internet

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

The service/profit chain

Summary

Action checklist

2. How Managers Need to Drive and Support a Service Strategy

Start from the top

Mission and vision

Values

Objectives

Strategy Summary

Action checklist

3. Listening to Customers

Barriers to listening

The monitoring of complaints and compliments

The value of listening to customers

Monitoring customer satisfaction

Where and when to measure

Continuous improvement

Involving employees when you measure

Recognising achievement

Involving head office departments in the measurement process

Canvass the view of other stakeholders

Best practice benchmarking

Summary

Action checklist

4. Implementing a customer care strategy

Continuous improvement

Marketing a service strategy

Managers lead the way

High or low key?

Summary

Action checklist

5. Empowerment and Ownership

Valued people value customers

Myths about empowerment

What should organisations do to encourage empowerment?

Service recovery and empowerment

Summary

Action checklist

6. The Internal Customer

Everyone has a customer

Developing understanding of internal customer needs

Process improvement

Don't forget suppliers, alliances and partners

Standards and charters

Service-level agreement

Suggestion schemes

Employee care

Summary

Action checklist

7. Training and Development for Customer Service

The growth importance of training and development in customer service

Identifying training and development objectives

Training and development for managers

Managers as trainers

Customer service training for front-line and support staff

The learning organisation

Build customer service into all training and development activities

Review and refresh training and development

Summary

Action checklist

8. Communications

Disseminating the message

Developing a communications strategy

Sell don't tell

Reinforcing the message

Tips on effective internal communication

A communications case study

Summary

Action checklist

9. Recognition and Reward

Motivation

Performance management

Developing a reward and recognition scheme

Review and renew

Summary

Action checklist

10. Sustaining a Customer Focus

Problems in sustaining the focus

Developing a maintenance strategy

Reviewing progress

Reinforcement

Summary