Best Customer Service Books: Improve the Best Selling Tool You Have

Offering great customer service is key to running a successful business. If your customers have a great experience with your organization, more often than not, they will be happy to become a loyal customer as well as recommend you to others.

Digitalization has allowed customers to be much more proactive than ever. They have more control over their purchasing experience, and often conduct research before making a purchase. They are also quick to share their experiences with others, such as on social media outlets and review pages, should it not meet their expectations.

As the customer’s role in the purchasing process changes, so too must your business, adapting and ever-evolving to ensure that your customer’s experience is a good one. Modern technology is also changing the way in which we connect with our customers, and it’s important to keep up with the ways in which people want to connect with you.

Offer a More Personal Experience

These days, more often than not, customers want to be treated more personally. They want to feel like they’re more than just another customer. They also want to buy from people, rather than a faceless organization. This means that it’s important to establish a level of familiarity, as early as possible, in order to achieve this more personal connection.

Your “About Us” page on your website is a fantastic opportunity in which you can convey your company’s ethos and best practices. The opportunities for your customers to contact you should also be varied, offering your potential clients multiple ways in which they can get in touch with you.

We spoke to some of the industry’s top professionals to put together a reading list of the best customer service books for you to improve your skills and practices. These recently published books come highly recommended for those who want to stay ahead of the game in customer service.

Best Customer Service Books

Unleashing Excellence: The Complete Guide to Ultimate Customer Service

Many authors tell you why great customer service matters; Yanovitch and Snow show you how to make it happen.

Rich Stamberger

CEO/SmartBrief, Inc.

Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service

Short, simple, highly effective.

Vivek Garipalli

Founder/Clover Health

The Customer Rules: The 39 Essential Rules for Delivering Sensational Service

At Zappos, many of our business decisions revolve around the customer. Lee Cockerell understands the importance of a great customer experience and shows you how to Deliver Happiness to your customers.

Tony Hsieh

CEO/Zappos

Amaze Every Customer Every Time: 52 Tools for Delivering the Most Amazing Customer Service on the Planet

At Zappos, we aim to deliver WOW through service. This book illustrates how important it is to WOW and AMAZE Every Customer Every Time!

Tony Hsieh

CEO/Zappos

The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence: The Handbook For Becoming the “Nordstrom” of Your Industry

The Nordstrom Way shows the direct link between empowering your employees and creating a long-term relationship with your customers. More businesses should follow Nordstrom's example.

Howard Schultz

Chairman/Starbucks

The Service Culture Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Employees Obsessed with Customer Service

Though research continues to uncover the astonishing impact of customer-focused cultures on customer loyalty and business results, few organizations know how to get there. Jeff Toister unlocks that mystery through this practical (and fun to read!) guide to developing a culture that really works

Brad Cleveland

Former CEO/International Customer Management Institute

Uplifting Service: The Proven Path to Delighting Your Customers, Colleagues, and Everyone Else You Meet

Uplifting Service gets to the bottom of what every great business should be, and then uplifts it. Ron's message is timely and the architecture he provides for building a service culture is timeless. This is a necessary book for every business.

Ann Rhodes

Exceutive VP/Jet Blue

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

I chose this book because it taught me how important it is that your business represents you and that you passionately believe in it. I also learned from it the importance of organizational culture, and that the endpoint of a sale should always be customer's happiness, not the money-product/service exchange.

Robert Hajnal

Founder/Trail Running Academy

The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t)

Then, when it comes to telling stories and putting things together in a structure, “The Brain Audit” is a good book; “Then Coffee and Kale Compete” – that’s about jobs to be done; “The Ask Method” – that’s also another very important one, pretty good when it comes to putting your thoughts together and putting marketing templates together, like landing pages, anything like this.

Louis Grenier

Podcaster in Chief/Everyone Hates Marketers

Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization (Que Biz-Tech)

One of the five books Jeff recommends to young people interested in his career path.

Jeff Gibbard

Chief Brand Officer/From The Future

What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

Being outcome-driven enabled us to grow our market share in the angioplasty balloon market from less than 1 percent to over 20 percent and to create the stent, which became a billion-dollar business in less than two years.

Rick Faleschini

VP Marketing/Johnson & Johnson

Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

As for my favorite business book, I'd probably say Competing Against Luck. It talks about the "Jobs to be Done" mindset when you're thinking about why your customers buy your product. I found that it puts you in the right mindset to understand the perspective of your customers so you can serve them better. It's surprisingly hard to understand the reasons why people buy things and this book helps you look at it from a much better angle.

Chris Oliver

Founder/GoRails

Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

This book lays out a framework to help any startup brainstorm ways to gain more customer traction.

Gunhee Park

Co-Founder/Populum

Building a Big Small Business Brand: How to Turn Your Brand into Your Most Valuable Asset

This book belongs in the hands of every small business owner serious about beating their competition and becoming more successful than ever imagined. Building a Big Small Business Brand shows how with real-world examples and plenty of eye-candy to make it worth reading over and over again. It also belongs in the hands of every graphic designer, providing tools to help communicate to their clients the ever increasing importance of branding.

Glenn Taylor

Owner/ChromaGraphics

Uncontainable: How Passion, Commitment, and Conscious Capitalism Built a Business Where Everyone Thrives

There's an amazing book by the Container Store CEO.

Jilliene Helman

CEO/Realty Mogul

The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets

A spectacularly useful look at what determines success in the hospitality industry, packed with the insights of great leaders and practitioners from our industry, put together by Micah Solomon, one of today's preeminent thought leaders on where hospitality, customer service, and customers themselves are heading.

Herve Humler

COO/The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company

The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success

The EQ Edge by Edward Book is an excellent book about emotional intelligence with different exercises of how to deal with irrational thoughts in a rational manner. The exercise is called the ABCDE system I use it as part of my coaching technique & with practice it becomes a natural skill that helps us to avoid unnecessary fears and illusions.

Nadia Al Sheikh

Founder/Deal’n

Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Inovation

Downes and Nunes provide some very thought-provoking guidance to existing businesses about how to compete, innovate, and win in this new world of the disruptive startup.

Michael Dell

CEO/Dell

Badass: Making Users Awesome

How to make amazing products. Super fun to read too.

Lewis Smith

Entrepreneur & Developer/BodyTracker

The New Power Base Selling: Master The Politics, Create Unexpected Value and Higher Margins, and Outsmart the Competition

Power Base Selling has been the most pragmatic and effective guide in my professional services career. Jim and Ryan's new concept of Unexpected Value is fundamental to differentiating your product and defending your margins.

Patrick Nicolet

CEO/Infrastructure Services

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI

Read some wonderful and enlightening books this year.

Doug McMillon

CEO/Walmart

Purple Cow

Then, again when I was younger, at the beginning of 2000s, Seth Godin’s Purple Cow and The Cluetrain Manifesto were two pieces of work I’d always refer to, as well as Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, later on when I was looking at how to become a better tech entrepreneur.

Dragos Novac

CEO/Nordic 9

Raise the Bar: An Action-Based Method for Maximum Customer Reactions

This is by John Taffer of Bar Rescue. I don't agree with everything he says in this book, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for Taffer's accomplishments and experience. He has a lot of good ideas in this book, many of which we have implemented in our business. This is a much smaller book than #1 and #2, and in no way a substitute for either.

Chuck Rogers

Owner/Chuck Rogers Consulting

Invisible Selling Machine

John thinks that Digital Marketer founding CEO Ryan Deiss' 2015 book is a great introduction to sales tactics for the new entrepreneur.

Daymond John

Founder/FUBU

If You’re Not First, You’re Last: Sales Strategies to Dominate Your Market and Beat Your Competition

Grant Cardone: The 10X Rule, Sell or Be Sold, If You're Not First You're Last and Be Obsessed or Be Average. Grant is the real deal. He helped me realize that I've been dreaming far too low!

Mark Struczewski

Host/The Mark Struczewski Podcast

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Over the years he’s [Tony Hsieh] recommended well over 20 business books — including his own, the 2010 bestseller Delivering Happiness and you can always find what he’s currently reading atop his cluttered desk. Start with Why is amogst those titles.

Tony Hsieh

CEO/Zappos

Launch: An Internet Millionaire’s Secret Formula To Sell Almost Anything Online, Build A Business You Love, And Live The Life Of Your Dreams

This book is a must read for everyone trying to influence and change people’s lives in a positive way. It’s a GREAT business book, but it’s also much more than a business book. I plan to get a copy for every Hay House author.

Reid Tracy

CEO/Hay House, Inc.

The Remains of the Day

If you read The Remains of the Day, which is one of my favorite books, you can't help but come away and think, I just spent 10 hours living an alternate life and I learned something about life and about regret. You can't do that in a blog post.

Jeff Bezos

CEO/Amazon

The Lean Startup

There are quite a few good business books on technology, and I'll list below some I find to be a good starting point. Personally, I like biographies a lot and I mostly read biographies of dead people, because those are the most honest ones. So because the computer age is still very young, there won't be a lot of biographies in my list.

Bogdan Iordache

Co-Founder/How to Web