Sharp begins the book with his personal story. He came from a modest, unpretentious family with a background in construction. His first motor hotel (motel) opened in Toronto in 1961, and what made it different was his service oriented philosophy. By 1963, his second hotel opened called Toronto’s Inn on the Park, and its resort style setting with its gym claimed instant success. By 1976, the opening of the Four Seasons in San Francisco which entered into a management contract for The Clift already defined true luxury.

When the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C. on Pennsylvania Avenue opened, the phenomenal service transformed the hotel owner-operator to a hugely successful management company synonymous with quality and the worldwide reputation of luxury travel. “One way to characterize Four Seasons – exchange of mutual respect performed with an attitude of kindness,” states Sharp, and that same promise remains  today as the Four Seasons continue to have the highest rated 140 luxury hotels in more than 40 countries.

The Four Season’s business plan focused on quality 24 hour service. In the 1970′s, the concentration on exceptional quality set apart business travel. The introduction of hair dryers, concierge service, televisions with concealed doors, non-smoking rooms, and fitness centers provided service and luxury to the sophisticated traveler. Even today, the morning meetings remain an integral part of the four primary elements of the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts property.

Every morning service, quality, and culture brand are set forward by the guest relations manager. This includes a recap of the guests staying at the hotel and discussions ranging from a guest needing a hypoallergenic pillow, gluten-free food, or even a special skin cream. The Glitch Report, which is a review of the previous day’s mistakes is a way to make it right with a sincere apology and then doing something special for a guest later on. Every department is represented in the morning meetings from housekeeping to upper management. The team effort is what makes up the cornerstone of the Four Seasons culture, and trusted employees are granted the discretion to do the right thing to make their guests happy.

Sharp’s personal tragedy and his philanthropy reveal the very human side of a vulnerable person. In November 1976, his son Chris, a strapping, six-foot-two athlete was diagnosed with deadly melanoma. On May 10, 1978 Chris lost his battle, but his spirit inspired The Marathon of Hope two years later when a local newspaper carried a story  of a young man Terry Fox who had lost a leg to cancer and was running across Canada on an artificial limb to raise money for cancer research.

Dear Terry:

The Marathon of Hope has just begun. You started it. We will not rest until your dream to find a cure for cancer is realized. I am asking every Four Seasons hotel to organize, along with the local branch of the Canadian Cancer Society, a Terry Fox Marathon of Hope Run to be held on the first Sunday in October. Beginning this year, it will become an annual fund-raising event for the Terry Fox Cancer Research Fund and we will not stop until cancer has been beaten.

Isadore Sharpe

Terry died the following year, but not before he learned his dream had come true. He raised one dollar for every person then living in Canada:$24 million.

In the last few pages of his book, Sharpe tells us who they are, and that is a company that manages the finest hotels, resorts, and residence clubs supported with a “deeply instilled ethic of personal service.” And in response to how they succeed, Sharpe concludes with;

We succeed when every decision is based on a clear understanding of and belief in what we do and when we couple this conviction with sound financial planning. Our greatest asset, and the key to our success, is our people. In all our interactions with guests, customers, business associates, and colleagues, we seek to deal with others as we would have them deal with us.

Bottomline: The book is unpretentious, inspirational, and offers excellent advice about the importance of customer service. It provides some good lessons about the value of long-term service employees and how they are role models for new hires and front end advisers for improvement. The book offers excellent advice on training to help employees realize the importance of consistently amazing customer service.

Pros: The book provides a great personal story of a man who started out with little money and no training. Rising through the years of a sharp recession makes his story more pertinent today. The personal photographs brings in the humanity and compassion of Sharp.

Cons: There were few secondary sources. I found some of the foreign stories one-sided.

Interested: You can purchase this book from Amazon.com for $19.77 in hardcover format or $19.99 in Kindle format. You can buy it here.

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- Driver: Extroverted, egotistical, project driven, and makes decisions based on results. An example of this “Thinker” would be Donald Trump, and the “You’re fired” line.
- Analytical: Introverted, project driven, and makes decisions based on facts. An example of this “Thinker” would be Dr. Spock from Star Trek.
- Expressive: Spontaneous, good negotiator,and learns by doing. An example of  this “Feeler” would be Jimmy Buffett who lives life to the fullest and is not detail driven.
-Amiable: Peacemaker, introverted, loyal, and decides based on emotions. An example of this “Feeler” would be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

Throughout the book, the author describes what each personality can bring to customers, fellow employees and the sales staff; how they react as managers and what an owner can do to enhance everyone’s best talents.

The book starts out like a regular retail sales training book, but highlights some great ideas. It is divided into eight chapters beginning with the financial and physical aspects of retail stores, and honesty in on employee hiring, training, building, and coaching. The author also emphasized the importance of marketing to help create a successful business and touches upon social media including Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and of course, the company website.

In the beginning of the book, the author suggests a company start with evaluating their financial situation based on the Profit and Loss statements, which may require a company to increase prices, limit discounts, cut waste, eliminate overtime, and hand out paychecks personally in order to have a personal knowledge of one’s own company’s expenses. Interviews for new employees should be no longer than 20 minutes and some sample interview questions such as asking a candidate to describe a typical day at his/her last job, or describe when you went out of your way for a client can help to increase the 51% chance of choosing an outstanding employee.

The importance of helping employees by using written job descriptions, handbooks for the “don’ts” of the business, and training that covers the “do” procedures will ensure employees function as you want. Great employees do the right things when you aren’t there.

Mr. Phibbs used an example of an older woman coming into a store looking for carpeting. Jane’s pet had recently died and the carpeting needed replacement. The woman was retired, on a fixed income and now had a new puppy. The saleswoman found a selection Jane loved and worked up an estimate. The price was $4,200, a higher price than the woman had expected, but the salesperson offered her interest free financing for 36 months. Less expensive products were offered, but Jane kept coming back to her original choice, and just wanted to think about it.

“As I was getting out my business card, I asked Jane if there was ‘anything else’ concerning her about purchasing the carpet. She told me she didn’t think she could move the books out of her bookcase and the curios out of her cabinets, and that because her children were scattered over the United States, she didn’t have anyone to help her. I told her I would come over a week before the installation and give her a hand with moving her furniture. Jane replied by asking me, ‘How much would it cost me?’ and I answered, ‘Lunch-peanut butter or tuna fish are my favorites.’ She laughed, asked me how much of  deposit I needed and got out her checkbook. That is the essence of great retail; being of service to someone else. Help her to see that you have both the answer and the way to make her life better.”

The advice and step by step descriptions of  the six stages of training emphasizes there are no shortcuts to becoming top sales personnel, and exemplary customer service is always an integral part of the success. When the entire staff is able to work together, the business grows and the company makes more money. The author states there is no such thing as a level playing field in retail since stores like Wal-Mart will always be able to offer lower prices, Best Buy will always have more inventory, and a mall will be able to offer better parking than a downtown shopping district, but you can find unique ways to make your store more attractive and train your staff to consistently deliver exceptional results every day.

Bottomline: I enjoyed reading the book. It is chock full of logical, practical advice. The real world examples show just how training and an awareness of different personality types can make a profound difference between success and failure. In a very tough economic crisis, businesses need to be unique and figure out what truly differentiates their business from a multitude of other retailers out there selling similar products. Phibbs shows the reader a practical step by step approach.

Pros: The book gives the reader a lot of detail into the “do’s and don’ts” of building a unique retail store. There are step by step examples to jolt you into a challenging way of thinking about store design, products and staff, and most suggestions are applicable to any business.

Cons: Even though I found the descriptions of the different types of personalities interesting, it became very drawn out and confusing. Parts of the book seemed to be more of a psychological dialogue aimed toward personality quirks than a guide to building a better business.

Interested? The Retail Doctor’s Guide to Growing Your Business is available on Amazon.com for $13.57 (paperback) and $9.99 (Kindle).

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With a constant emphasis on customer service, Kazanjian reveals the simple philosophy of Taylor’s approach to customer service. “Take care of your customers and employees first, and the profits will follow.” The “Founding Values” which could be adopted by all companies emphasized:

- Protecting your brand
- Let it be a fun and friendly place to work
- Make sure you have teamwork
- Reward hard work
- Help your own community

Taylor knew to be successful a business had to stand out from the crowd, and to make his business different from other car rental places, the trademark slogan was born, “Pick Enterprise. We’ll Pick You Up.”

The book emphasizes that satisfying customers is not complicated. Regularly surveying customers, but keeping questions targeted to one specific area could evaluate the company’s progress. Three questions pertaining to customer service became staples:

1. How satisfied were you?
2. What could we have done to improve our service?
3. What do you think we do especially well?

You don’t have to be perfect; you just have to handle problems promptly and appropriately. Included in the training were steps to turn angry customers around. Taylor assumed many customers when renting cars were on vacation, and he wanted people to remember their vacations with positive experiences. Employees were taught to listen with an understanding and sympathetic attitude and record or repeat back to the customer what had gone wrong. Employees were to apologize and find out what the customer wanted to make them feel better, and propose a solution. If the customer wasn’t satisfied with the representative’s solution, there would be more follow-up and to find a solution suggested by the customer that everyone could live with, with the final objective to make sure the customer never lost face.

The Enterprise Way has been a cautious company growing with limited risk. On some long term leases, when opening a new office, the company employs the “JCT” clause (after Jack Taylor) which allows the company to get out of its lease with 90 days notice and three additional rent payments, and although the economy has hit every business hard, Taylor’s philosophy remains timeless.

Bottomline: The book clearly explains starting and managing a company with practical and useful advice aimed towards customer service and employee satisfaction. The author’s logical sequence keeps you interested and entertained.

Pros: The rags to riches with a practical and humble approach is inspiring. We all enjoy reading true accounts of customer centered companies and their rise to success. The book provides practical information for customer service employees.

Cons: The book was copyrighted in 2007, and some of what was written seems out of date now. I have noticed in my own experience that Enterprise offices have been run down with less than stellar customer service representatives.

Interested: Exceeding Customer Expectations is available on Amazon.com for $16.47. You can buy it here.

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Author Barbara Burke told me she based her suggestions of short periods of meditation and conditioning the mind in a positive way from basic Buddhist philosophy although each person can discover the book’s universal wisdom message through their own particular lens.

The Napkin, The Melon & The Monkey: How to Be Happy and Successful at Work and in Life by Simply Challenging Your Mind follows the path of central character Olivia whose life as a customer service representative for a local power company is out of control with stress related over- eating binges, short tempered reactions to angry customers, and a strained relationship with her children and husband. She did not realize that, although our first reaction when being verbally assaulted by an angry customer would be to get defensive, or rather slip into the “fight or flight” mode, an emotional balance can be recaptured by emotionally detaching for a few moments enabling us to find inner peace.

It was another character, Isabel, who softly led Olivia toward that quiet path to eliminate knee jerk reactions to the everyday facets of stress and to be able to step back and observe what is and become more productive.

The acronym SODA – Stop, Observe, Decide, and Act is the author’s solution to help employees realize that the anger of a dissatisfied consumer isn’t personal; it’s the frustration of the situation. Olivia was eventually able to temper her anxieties when irate customers called and step back, listen, consider the situation objectively and calmly, and then respond in a positive manner.

Barbara Burke fashioned the whimsical idea of this book from Steve Denning’s popular story – telling approach and how it is easier to tell a story with a single protagonist whose accounts have universal appeal.

In the book, we are guided through the three main symbols along Olivia’s path to handling the daily stresses of life; both personally and professionally. At the end of the book, we are treated to a list of Olivia’s List of Aha!s reminding all of us of such basic guidelines easily incorporated into our own lives. Using such Aha!s as ” The less I talk, the more I learn,” or “There is no such thing as a difficult situation” employs easily applied tenets to help manage even the most challenging interactions professionally as well as personally.

The book has been translated into German; the title appearing when translated back into English – When Chocolate Does Not Work Anymore.

The author is offering a free downloadable  “Leader’s Guide” with the purchase of the book. The kit contains a PowerPoint presentation and instruction of facilitating a team meeting. The topic is “What’s Your Favorite Aha!”. The kit will be ready in early February. To be notified, send Barbara a request at: bb (at) barbaraburke (dot) com.

Bottomline: A quick and easy read which reminds all of us we have a lot more control of our reactions. The book reminds us to stop a moment and put our lives into a more peaceful place in order to be more productive and efficient both professionally and personally.

Pros: It is well-written and has an interesting story line applicable to anyone in the current, stressful marketplace. The book includes some basic reminders which are universally appealing and applicable.

Cons: SODA is a great concept, however the book falls short of customer service strategies.

Interested: You can purchase the book (published by Hay House) for about $15 from Amazon.com. The book comes out on February 1, 2010, but can be pre-ordered today.

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Business consultant and author Fred Reichheld thinks he has found the question that all companies need to ask in order to determine just how loyal their customers are – and he has humbly called it the ultimate question.

Reichheld talks about this ultimate question and what it should mean to you and your business in in his 200 page book entitled The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. The book, first published in 2006 by Harvard Business School Press, primarily focuses on three key areas: the “ultimate question,” a scoring method called “Net Promoter,” and the importance of “good profits.”

The “ultimate question” is the simple and common question of “How likely are you to recommend Company X to a friend or colleague?”. Net Promoter is a scoring method that subtracts the proportion of detractors from the proportion of promoters. Good profits are simply profits that come from people that actually want to use your products and services (as opposed to those who might be locked into contractors or dissatisfied for one reason or another).

Like many things in customer service, the premise behind the book and the Net Promoter concept is laughably simple: if you deliver an experience that makes people genuinely want to recommend your company to their friends, family, or colleagues, you’re going to grow. Just like many business books, The Ultimate Question takes this relatively simple concept and adds strategically placed healthy servings of jargon, buzzwords, and acronyms to help justify the three hours and $20 that the book will cost. After the first 50 pages, the book starts to drag on and get redundant, but there are plenty of examples and tidbits to make it worth reading until the end.

With that said, I’d still recommend reading the book because it clearly articulates some very important aspects of business and customer service. Recihheld’s core points make sense and the examples he provides are interesting. After reading the book, any competent customer service manager or executive can easily conduct a Net Promoter survey and make use of the results. He clearly explains what Net Promoter is, why it should matter to your business, and how to make it work. Even though I don’t agree with Recihheld’s view that the “would you recommend” question is the only question that needs to be asked (I think you need more information than that), I still think that the “would you recommend” question is a great question to ask and that Net Promoter has its merits.

Net Promoter isn’t exactly new to the business world and that may very well be one of its biggest strengths. A whole host of companies in a variety of industries make use of Net Promoter and many of them are fairly transparent about their scores. It’s interesting to see what your Net Promoter score is and then compare that to some of the big companies in your industry. The average Net Promoter score is around 10 and it’s possible to have a score anywhere between -100 and 100.

I’ve conducted Net Promoter surveys for several companies and have always found the results to be useful when they are coupled with other questions. Net Promoter doesn’t tell you everything, but there is really very little to lose in asking your customers how likely they are to recommend your company to a friend or colleague. You might be in for a rude awakening, but you’ll almost certainly come out of the process knowing more than you did before. Once you have the results from your first Net Promoter survey, you’ll be faced with the true ultimate question, the question of how to improve.

Bottomline: Despite being slightly redundant, The Ultimate Question clearly articulates the importance of and how to measure customer loyalty. You may not agree with all of Reichheld’s points, but a majority of them make sense and are applicable to almost any business.

Pros: The book fully explains Net Promoter and why it matters. It provides a plethora of advice and action items that managers and executives can use to start tracking customer loyalty.

Cons: Some of them Reichheld’s methods are more academic than they are practical and the second half of book gets annoyingly redundant.

Interested? You can purchase the book on Amazon.com for about $20. You can also see some of my other posts about Net Promoter here.

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Author Richard Hanks told me he decided to write the book because he was frustrated with a lack of hands on, practical books that addressed the topic of how to measure customer service. There were plenty of long, relatively boring “academic” type books on the subject, but he noticed a serious lack of “here’s how you do it” books. Thinking Delivering and Measuring Customer Service could help fill that gap, Richard worked on writing down and summarizing what he learned from his work at Marriott Hotels, PepsiCo, and most recently, his survey company Mindshare. His perspective is a unique one that makes for an informative book that is also an interesting read.

Delivering and Measuring Customer Service talks a lot about the importance of real time feedback and subsequently, the importance of mastering “the boring, everyday.” As Richard explained to me, if you run a hotel that’s located in an exquisite location, provides great customer service, and has wonderful food, you’d think your customers are going to be pretty happy. They should be, but if you don’t master the “boring, everyday” things like having clean bathrooms or ensuring the light bulbs in the room work after each guess, customers are going to be frustrated. If the bathroom in the room is dirty, the customer isn’t going to leave happy, no matter how good the rest of the experience is.

The actual book, which is about 200 pages of pretty easy reading, is divided into seven primary sections: General Overview, Cultural Catalysts of Service, Gathering Customer Experience Feedback, Analyzing the Results, Using Customer Feedback to Improve, Customer Service Recovery and Follow-up, and finally, Tips and Tricks. Each section contains a few sub-sections that delve into specific areas. They’re generally well presented, well organized, and informative.

Perhaps most importantly for this type of book, Delivering and Measuring Customer Service gives plenty of good tips that managers can act on right away. I read the book with a highlighter in hand and found myself highlighting something that I thought was interesting or insightful once every few pages. Like most of customer service, a lot of the advice is common sense, but a vast majority of customer service managers will be able to get something useful from this book, particularly with the book’s focus on measuring customer service. Very few customer service books spend so much time on the importance of and how to measure customer service.

According to Richard, great customer service and at the very least, mastery of the “boring” stuff stems from the repetition of consistency and dependability. To be a great customer service organization, you need to be able to provide great service all the time. Customers then start to expect great customer service and a standard is created. The ability to keep up with that standard is what sets the mediocre companies apart from the exceptional companies.

Bottomline: Delivering and Measuring Customer Service is a great book for those interested in the subject the name implies. It’s an easy and entertaining ready that is full of useful advice, guides, and information that customer service or business managers can take back to their teams and start acting on right away.

Pros: Easy to read with clever cartoons scattered throughout book, more than enough useful insight and advice to justify the price and time

Cons: The book tends to only touch (as opposed to explain in detail) many areas and also happens to jumps around. The lack of detail is both expected and acceptable given the book’s broad subject area and the jumping around isn’t noticeable or important to those reading the book for its content, as opposed to its literary merit (which is how most business books should be read).

Interested? You can buy the book on Amazon.com for about $20.

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Topgrading is a well-respected hiring technique that has is used at companies like GE and Microsoft. Companies that use Topgrading use it to determine who is an “A player” versus who is a B or a C player. The idea is that a team of 90% A players will be infinitely more productive and successful than a team comprised of mostly B and C players. The practice, which calls for multiple extremely in-depth interviews, is a sound one that has been successful for a lot of companies.

Topgrading for Sales is a good book that’s literally filled with action items and useful advice, but as I was reading it, I was trying to think of ways I could apply the practices outlined for hiring sales representatives to the hiring of customer service representatives. As I was drinking the metaphorical Topgrading Kool-Aid, I thought about some of the ways various companies go about hiring customer service representatives.

Through my conversations with various customer service executives, I’ve heard about both extremes and everything in between when it comes to hiring. Some companies do one half hour interview and call it a day, while others have multiple days of in-depth three and four interviews. As one would hope, the latter, while thoroughly exhausting, tends to be more effective.

After a bit of research, I found an article by Mike Faith, the CEO of Headsets.com (which I’ve written about multiple times), explaining how his company uses the Topgrading approach when interviewing, hiring, and evaluating customer service representatives. The article was interesting (and complemented the book nicely), but I still found myself looking for a details about how to apply Topgrading to customer service.

I’ve since ordered the full size edition of Topgrading (wish me luck as I read through it!) and will post an in-depth review when I finish it. I’m hoping a more in-depth knowledge of Topgrading will give me more insight about how to apply it specifically to customer service hires.

In the mean time, if you have or do use it, what has your experience been like with Topgrading? What about the broader task of hiring customer service representatives? I’m sending a couple of emails to a few HR and customer service executives I know and will report back with their thoughts as well.

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O’Keefe focuses on the “how” and provides a plethora of information about “how” to do things. The book isn’t academic and it isn’t really that marketing focused (i. e. run a community to help brand awareness, etc.) — it’s focused almost entirely on actually running an online forum or community. The book is for those who are looking to learn how to do it, not why to do it.

Managing Online Forums is essentially divided into ten parts:

1) Laying the Groundwork (planning and overall goals)
2) Developing Your Community (setting up and configuring the forum)
3) Developing Guidelines (community rules)
4) Promoting Your Community (self explanatory)
5) Managing Your Staff (working with the people who will help you run your community)
6) Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos (self explanatory)
7) Creating a Good Environment (working well with your members)
8 Keeping It Interesting (games, features, resources, etc.)
9) Making Money (self explanatory)
10) Appendix (resources, templates, etc.)

If you are a customer service manager looking to start a community for your company, you can probably skip parts 5 and 9. While these apply (and are very important) to traditional online communities, communities run by companies usually don’t deal with volunteer staff members or making money (the company handles both aspects). The other chapters, though, serve as a great introduction and overview of what it’s like to run a community. Experienced community managers probably won’t pick up too much from this book (there are still some really helpful tidbits), but for those new to community management, this book is a great book to start with. It is a perfect book to give to the customer service supervisor you want to be your community manager. That manager can have it right on their desk as they go through the process of setting up, starting, and eventually, running, the community.

Managing Online Forums is a dead simple read. It’s easy to skim and you won’t have to think too hard about what’s on the page – it is all pretty logical. Communities, like customer service, require thinking things through and making the logical choice. The topic isn’t that complex and it certainly isn’t abstract, so the simple tone and style of book is appropriate. The content is organized and written in a way that makes it easy to understand and easy to put into action, making it perfect for a newbie.

Bottomline: If anything, Managing Online Forums can serve as a useful and practical guide and overview for starting and managing an online community. O’Keefe provides the reader with an easy to follow how to guide that can be applied to almost any community without difficulty.

Pros: Easy to follow, useful templates and examples, lots of information covering a broad range of topics.

Cons: Because the book covers so many aspects of managing a community, it doesn’t go too far in depth on any particular aspect (with community rules / guidelines being the notable exception).

More on Service Untitled: For some more information about communities, check out this post about looking at communities like parties.

Note: According to the author’s web site, the book’s publication date is April 28. It is currently available in most Barnes & Noble stores.

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