Start With The Customer
New book calls time on second rate customer service and reveals why it’s time to put the customer back at the heart of business.
Start with the customer, a new book, written by Peter Cross, a leading expert in customer behaviour and ex Customer Experience Director at John Lewis and Waitrose, collaborating with Jo Causon, Chief Executive at the Institute of Customer Service, calls time on second rate service and reveals why it’s time to put the customer back at the heart of business.
The book re-frames our understanding of the modern customer, guides the reader through the forces shaping their behaviour, reveals the golden rules and cardinal sins of service and helps build a world-class service culture, fit for whatever you’re selling and wherever you’re selling it.
“I’ve written this book because I believe service brings something very special, not just to businesses and the customers they seek to serve, but to society as a whole and my hope is to rekindle a passion for it. A business may claim to love its customers, but conflicting priorities have made too many businesses less alert to how their customers are responding. Being passionate about data is not the same as being passionate about customers,”
– Peter Cross.
Featuring exclusive interviews with the leaders of those hospitality, travel, retail, automotive and energy brands who consistently rate highly in the UK Customer Satisfaction Index and a foreword by Mary Portas, this refreshingly honest and easy to read book includes:
- A new approach to understanding customers by exploring the eternal power of human need as both a driver of behaviour and means to stay one step ahead of bboth your customers and competitors.
- An insightful guide on how to create an empowered and enabled “listening culture” which can be applied across businesses of all sizes and sectors.
- How to elevate the service your business offers, by discovering, perfecting and standardising signature moments in your customer experience.
- The keys to employee happiness which ensure that teams feel complicit inncreating the customer outcomes your business wants to see.
- What it takes to find, retain and lead people to deliver service excellence.
- A compelling and provocative portrait of the customer of the future.
“It clearly makes financial sense for companies to instil and embed a culture that has service at its heart. The businesses featured in our book have decades of wisdom on what makes good service, how to deliver it and how to build and nurture a service culture within business across all sectors and of all sizes,”
– Jo Causon, CEO of the Institute of Customer Service.
The Institute of Customer Service is the UK’s independent professional customer service body. The Institute exists to improve business performance through service excellence. For more info please visit www.instituteofcustomerservice.com.
