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eCustomerServiceWorld.com recommended reads
(NB Check out our Top Ten and our New Books as well!)Browse through and click on a title for a review. 
 | | Knock Your Socks Off Answers: Solving Customers Nightmares & Soothing Nightmare Customers
Author: Ron Zemke
UK Publisher: Amacom
ISBN: 0814478840
Quick Review: This humorous sequel to "Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service" shows customer service providers how to deliver superior service under fire and field tough customer questions with ease. By dissecting actual customer service questions and challenges, the book enables service providers to deliver excellent service in any difficult customer situation. The reader discovers how to: interpret the wants, needs, attitudes and fears implicit in customer questions, and provide real benefits, not just a snappy retort; acquire finesse in negotiating win-win solutions; succeed in those questions that have no easy answers; and allow the customer to feel in control of the situation, even when the customer is wrong. Links:
eArticles store (articles by Ron Zemke)
eResearch Store (Ron’s listing in the Who's Who)
eProducts & Services Store (Ron’s consulting company, PRA)
eSpeakers Store (to enquire about booking Ron as a speaker) buy UK() buy US($)
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| | Knock Your Socks Off Service Recovery
Author: Ron Zemke, Chip R. Bell and John Bush
UK Publisher: Amacom
ISBN: 081447084X
Quick Review:Cancelled flights, damaged goods, botched bills, locked-up
software--these are the service screw-ups that leave customers angry,
disgusted...and determined to never buy from you again! But
these mad-as-hell customers can be wooed back through skillful, planned
service recovery. And, surprisingly, customers who experience
world-class Knock Your Socks Off service recovery become your most loyal
customers--and are a source of continuing business for years to come.
Designed and written for supervisors and managers who are responsible for hiring, training,
coaching, and motivating customer contact employees who deal with upset,
disappointed, unhappy customers. Discusses how to help these customers and keep
them coming back even after the problems experienced. Softcover. DLC: Customer
services.
Links:
Ron's articles eArticles Store
Ron Zemke speaks! eSpeakers Store
Ron's Who's Who entry eResearch Store buy UK() buy US($)
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| | Know Yourself, Know Your Customer
Author: John Butler and Frenk Scheelen
UK Publisher: Oak Tree Press
ISBN: 1860762395
US Publisher:
ISBN:
Quick Review: Customers are better informed and more sophisticated and hav emore choices than in the past. Your customer expects something special from you, otherwise they are going to go elsewhere. The best possible road to success for you as a professional lies in “bonding” customers to you in stable long-term relationships. buy UK() buy US($)
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| | Kotler On Marketing: How To Create, Win and Dominate Markets
Author: Philip Kotler
UK Publisher: Free Press
ISBN: 0684860473
More than any other individual, Kotler is responsible for making the "marketing paradigm" (the idea that you prosper by "managing demand") ascendant not only in business, but also in politics, human relationships and art. So when Kotler speaks, the world should listen. This book addresses the problems of how to market in a globalised ultra-competitive world where technology is developing at a pace even technologists can't keep up with. Aimed firmly at marketing practitioners, the book aims to turn the vagaries of the latest marketing thinking and the often bafflingly complex implications of new technology into hard nosed, actionable marketing practice. It's a tough brief but he carries it off with deep insight and great panache. Advice on tactical marketing is usually a graveyard when it comes to literary style and innovative thought because it is so easy to get bogged down in details. But Kotler brilliantly manages to do the nitty gritty stuff while retaining a critical overview. For instance in the chapter on "Designing The Marketing Mix" he rightly suggests that two more "Ps" ought to be added to the 4 ps , (product, price, place and promotion) which constitute the fundamentals of the marketing managers job; those are Politics and Public Opinion. But he never gets too intoxicated with his own wisdom. "The issue is not whether there should be four six or ten Ps, so much as what is most helpful in designing marketing strategy," he says quite sensibly. Even if you know everything there is to know about marketing, this book will shed fresh light on it. And if, like the rest of us, you don't know everything, it would be hard to find a better place to start learning. --Alex Benady buy UK() buy US($)
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| | Lateral Marketing: New Techniques For Finding Breathrough Ideas
Author: Philip Kotler and Fernando Trias De Bes
UK Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc
ISBN: 0471455164
By Donald Mitchell, an Amazon Top 100 Reviewer “Lateral Marketing looks at the tendency of traditional marketing to segment markets into ever smaller units as a way to create differentiation and help repel new entrants and existing competitors. The authors provide lots of statistics to point out that it's getting harder and harder to launch successful new products, and the prospects are getting worse.
That kind of a finding could leave any serious marketer feeling depressed, but Professors Kotler and Trias de Bes go on the propose a solution: Focus on expanding the scope of what you consider as having new product potential by using Edward de Bono's concept of lateral thinking (as developed in his book by the same name first published in 1970). Although lateral thinking was designed to expand all types of creativity, the authors show how it can be specifically applied marketing.
They provide a convincing case that many of the more innovative new products and services (cereal bars, Kinder Surprise toy-filled chocolate eggs, 7-Eleven in Japan becoming a depot for ordering and packing up e-commerce products, Actimel, food stores in gas stations, cyber cafes, reality TV contests, and Huggies Pull-Ups) in recent years could have been developed using lateral thinking. Traditional marketing thinking and lateral thinking are compared in a helpful table on pages 92 and 93.
On page 97, they define "lateral marketing" as "a work process which when applied to existing products or services, produces innovative new products and services that cover needs, uses, situations, or targets not currently covered and, and therefore, is a process that offers a high chance of creating new categories or markets."
Many people can do lateral thinking intuitively by thinking about what could be different about products or services that customers would like. The book makes this intuition more analytically based by breaking it down into routine steps that anyone can use individually or in a group to come up with innovative perspectives.”
buy UK() buy US($)
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| | Lead to Succeed: 10 traits of great leadership in business and life.
Author: Rick Pitino
UK Publisher: Random
ISBN: 0767903412
As Rick Pitino says, great leaders aren't born great; they learn leadership along the path of life. From the time Pitino first became a coach at twenty-four, he has been a student of leadership in all its forms. He discovered that leaders, in business, politics or civil rights, have certain qualities in common; these leaders share key traits that make people want to listen to them and follow them. buy UK() buy US($)
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| | Leader: Be your best...and beyond
Author: John Thompson and Catherine Doherty
UK Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 0340856300
‘Leader – Be Your Best & Beyond’ – is a great little book I’ve just discovered, though it came out in 2003. I shouldn’t mention it as it is a competitor to my own book that came out this summer (2005) but, ahem, I like this one better (there’s a confession…), especially to introduce you to the idea of yourself or your people as leader(s) if you haven’t taken yourself or them seriously enough as leadership material in the past. Phil Dourado, eCSW.com buy UK() buy US($)
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| | Leadership
Author: Rudolph Giuliani
UK Publisher: Talk Miramax Books
ISBN: 0786868414
Quick Review: The minutes and hours following 11th September terror attacks on the World Trade Center posed the greatest challenge to governance in New York City's history. Mayor Rudoph Guiliani had barely escaped with his life in the collapse of the first tower. Fires burned furiously near the site as the other buildings verged on collapse. Air Force fighter jets criss-crossed the sky to ward off other attacks. And yet in those moments after the calamity, and in the following days and months, Mayor Guiliani not only steered the city through the crisis, but did so with an assurance and authority that was hailed around the world as a model of courageous leadership. In this book, Guiliani describes vividly the chaos and horror of the twin-towers catastrophe, and explains how the rules of management he enforced as Mayor enabled him to gain control of the emergency. These are also the rules, Guiliani makes clear, that anyone in a leadership position - from the head of a large corporation to the owner of a corner shop - can use to inspire others and achieve concrete results. buy UK() buy US($)
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| | Leadership and the One Minute Manager
Author: Ken Blanchard et al
UK Publisher: HarperCollins Business
ISBN: 0007103417
US Publisher: William Morrow
ISBN: 0688039693
Leadership and the One Minute Manager describes the effective, adaptive styles of Situational Leadership. It teaches how to become a flexible and successful leader, fitting your style to the needs of the individual and to the situation at hand.
and using the One Minute Manager techniques to enhance the motivation of others. Includes the Four Basic Leadership Styles: Directing, Coaching, Supporting, and Delegating, and how to use them to best effect. Thousands of readers find Blanchard’s short, simple, style easy to absorb and rave about him. A few describe it as too simplistic for them. One reviewer on Amazon describes it as child psychology applied to adults. Whatever. If it works, it works, and we mostly find Dr. Blanchard’s unstuffy, clear approach a breath of fresh air when compared with the overly-complicated “Aren’t I clever” approach of other management writers. His customer-centered credentials, as co-author of the seminal Raving Fans (all about how to turn customers into fans), make his books particularly insightful reading for eCSW.com members and site users.
buy UK() buy US($)
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| | Leadership: Inspire, Liberate, Achieve. Part of the Tom Peters Essentials series.
Author: Tom Peters
UK Publisher: Dorling Kindersley
ISBN: 1405302577
Talent, Trends, Leadership, Design, are the four books Dorling-Kindersley and Tom Peters have produced so far by breaking down his big book, Re-Imagine! into bite-size chunks. Publisher’s synopsis: “Turn your company into a dynamic centre of excellence. Instead of looking for things that have gone wrong in your organisation and trying to fix them, look for things that went right and try to build on them. Perceptive, provocative and inspiring ideas to transform the way you work, this is your crucial guide to leadership to help you reinvent your business from management guru Tom Peters.” buy UK() buy US($)
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