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
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
by Simon Sinek
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.
CEO/Zappos
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
by Tony Hsieh
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.
Founder/Trail Running Academy
Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers
by Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares
This book lays out a framework to help any startup brainstorm ways to gain more customer traction.
Co-Founder/Populum
Launch: An Internet Millionaire’s Secret Formula To Sell Almost Anything Online, Build A Business You Love, And Live The Life Of Your Dreams
by Jeff Walker
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.
CEO/Hay House, Inc.
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.
CEO/Dell
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.
Owner/ChromaGraphics
The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets
Sooner or later, we're all in the hospitality business. I bet you'll find that Chapter 8 alone is worth the cost of the book.
Author & Entrepreneur
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.
CEO/Zappos
Amaze Every Customer Every Time: 52 Tools for Delivering the Most Amazing Customer Service on the Planet
by Shep Hyken
At Zappos, we aim to deliver WOW through service. This book illustrates how important it is to WOW and AMAZE Every Customer Every Time!
CEO/Zappos
Raise the Bar: An Action-Based Method for Maximum Customer Reactions
by Jon Taffer
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.
Owner/Chuck Rogers Consulting
The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence: The Handbook For Becoming the “Nordstrom” of Your Industry
by Robert Spector, Patrick D. McCarthy
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.
Chairman/Starbucks
Uplifting Service: The Proven Path to Delighting Your Customers, Colleagues, and Everyone Else You Meet
by Ron Kaufman
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.
Exceutive VP/Jet Blue
Badass: Making Users Awesome
by Kathy Sierra
How to make amazing products. Super fun to read too.
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.
CEO/Infrastructure Services
Unleashing Excellence: The Complete Guide to Ultimate Customer Service
by Dennis Snow, Teri Yanovitch
Many authors tell you why great customer service matters; Yanovitch and Snow show you how to make it happen.
CEO/SmartBrief, Inc.
The Service Culture Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Employees Obsessed with Customer Service
by Jeff Toister
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
Former CEO/International Customer Management Institute
The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t)
by Sean D'Souza
Recommended by Louis Grenier (Podcaster in Chief/Everyone Hates Marketers)
Source: Everyone Hates Marketers - How Louis Grenier Built a Podcast Out of Love for True Marketing
Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization (Que Biz-Tech)
Recommended by Jeff Gibbard (Chief Brand Officer/From The Future)
Source: Social Business Strategist Jeff Gibbard Shares the Books That Formed His Business Perspective
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.
VP Marketing/Johnson & Johnson
Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
by Clayton Christensen, Karen Dillon, Taddy Hall, David S. Duncan
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.
Founder/GoRails
The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success
by Steven J. Stein, Howard E. Book
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.
Founder/Deal’n
Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI
by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson
Recommended by Doug McMillon (CEO/Walmart)
Source: Doug McMillon on Facebook
Invisible Selling Machine
by Ryan Deiss
John thinks that Digital Marketer founding CEO Ryan Deiss' 2015 book is a great introduction to sales tactics for the new entrepreneur.
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!
Host/The Mark Struczewski Podcast
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.
CEO/Amazon