Yous've probably heard one of the more famous -isms in the world before: "The customer is always right."

But y'all probably too know that "the customer is always correct," isn't the only cardinal to making customers and then happy they stick around. There are a variety of other philosophies, strategies, and tools customer-facing professionals and teams tin use to turn customers into loyal promoters and advocates.

But how do you acquire everything you need to know to turn yourself -- and your team -- into a high-performing customer happiness engine?

There are a lot of things yous can acquire on the task when y'all work in customer service. Only sometimes, information technology's faster to learn from an expert, so you can accept their learnings after years of research and experience, and immediately implement them in your own workflow.

→ Download Now: State of Customer Service in 2020 [Free Report]

Peruse this volume listing to acquire from the experts almost client service, client success, leadership, and writing. All of these books incorporate valuable insights for anyone working in a customer-facing office, so pick one to go started on improving your knowledge so you can become an skillful, too.

20 Top Customer Service Books

Client Service Books

Read these books to learn nigh how to create an infrequent customer experience -- featuring real-world case studies and time-tested methods created by industry thought leaders.

1. Uncommon Service: How to Win past Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

Authors Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that, in gild to provide infrequent client service, you lot need to do other things less-than-exceptionally. That'south correct: The authors advocate for underperforming in i surface area of your business organisation in order to excel at customer service -- considering, they fence, yous can't do everything well.

The authors encourage businesses to place what their customers value nigh, prioritize excelling in that business role, and accept that this prioritization volition consequence in underperformance in other areas. They argue that customer service will get a competitive differentiator for customers trying to choose among many different options, and so this tough truth is also a necessary i.

2. The Nordstrom Fashion to Customer Feel Excellence: Creating a Values-Driven Service Culture

Nordstrom has prepare the standard for customer happiness in the sea of its other department shop competitors, so authors Robert Spector and BreAnne O. Reeves literally wrote the book on how they did it.

Primal insights from Nordstrom include empowering cocky-motivated employees to go the extra mile to brand customers happy, to prioritize ease-of-use for your customers beyond every touchpoint they have with your make, and to always think similar the client to build a client-axial brand on every team and function inside your business.

3. The Amazement Revolution: Vii Customer Service Strategies to Create an Amazing Customer (and Employee) Experience

Authored by customer service thought leader Shep Hyken, this book offers 7 applied strategies to improve client happiness and loyalty, including cultivating partnership with customers, providing unique membership awards, and building community with customers.

This volume is all steak and no sizzle, with tons of applied ideas and strategies supported by real-world examples that readers tin can take into work with them as shortly as they read.

4. Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Go on Your Customers

Author Jay Baer wrote Hug Your Haters for a mod customer service organization that isn't merely congenital on the phone or email, but on social media and on messaging apps, too. Baer implores readers to build their client service organization around these digital channels, where the majority of customers share their rave reviews -- also as their complaints.

In the book, Baer teaches readers how to handle your haters and your trolls, how to mensurate customer service productivity, the impacts of not addressing customer complaints, and how to utilize his frameworks for responding to customers complaints beyond a diverseness of online channels.

5. The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Visitor

If yous're non familiar with the Ritz-Carlton'due south famous customer service policy, it'due south pretty legendary: Every unmarried employee, no matter what their function, has the discretion to spend up to $2,000 per 24-hour interval to improve customer feel.

This policy, and the principles and foundations behind it, take congenital the brand a legion of loyal customers, and in this volume, author Joseph Michelli explains how other brands can build a similarly memorable brand and customer feel -- using principles like "empower [employees] through trust," "exit a lasting footprint," and "define and refine [the experience you want customers to have]."

vi. The Thank You Economic system

Marketing mogul and writer Gary Vaynerchuk regularly talks nigh the importance of 1:i communication in marketing -- and his philosophies extend to the customer service world, too.

In this book, Vaynerchuk writes that the era of minor courtesies is returning to the business world, now that social media has enabled businesses to communicate more intimately across different channels. He likewise writes that, if businesses don't pursue 1:1 customer care and appointment, they'll lose business organisation to their competitors. This book will make you think nigh how to use the ability of technology to more effectively grow and scale relationships with customers effectually the world.

7. What Customers Crave: How to Create Relevant and Memorable Experiences at Every Touchpoint

Author Nicholas Webb has some things to say nearly the current state of client experience: "Permit'southward face it: Today, most customer experience programs are a disaster."

Webb things only businesses that offer "optimal" customer service will survive -- and that most businesses are a long way off from achieving that. The main reason, Webb argues, is because the technological innovations of the terminal few decades take made information technology easier for businesses to care for and review customers like data points, instead of treating them like real people.

Webb calls for reviewing each touchpoint a client shares with your business organization, and evaluating what y'all tin practice, both online and offline, to improve each step of that experience. Optimizing each phase of the customer experience, instead of making broad-strokes changes, will satisfy individualistic customers who won't be satisfied by the bare minimum.

Customer Success Books

These books are nigh taking client service to the next level -- into customer success. Once you've started solving your customers' issues and helping guide them toward other solutions and strategies for achieving their goals with your production or service, you tin start building a customer success plan -- one that helps your customers succeed so your business succeeds, and turns your happy customers into your loyal advocates and evangelists.

8. Customer Success: How Innovative Companies are Reducing Churn and Growing Revenue

Authored by some of the pioneers of the client success movement, this is the definitive volume to read to get the lay of the customer success country -- focused squarely on improving customer loyalty, decreasing churn, and adapting to the advent of the subscription economic system.

The book focuses primarily on subscription-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses, but the principles and ideas they explore are relevant to any industry or business. A key concept that's explored once again and again is client loyalty -- and specifically, behavioral vs. attitudinal loyalty. Attitudinal loyalty, the authors explain, is loyalty when customers love a detail brand or production, and it'southward ideal -- but difficult to achieve.

9. The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Forcefulness Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value

This book is authored by Frederick Reichheld -- one of the creators of the Net Promoter Score® -- the landmark client happiness and loyalty metric many businesses use today. And like the NPS, the ideas originally published by Reichheld back in 1996 are some of the about widely-shared beliefs in the customer service and success spaces today.

Chief among his findings and arguments include the finding that loyal customers are cheaper to service than non-loyal customers, that loyal customers are typically more willing to pay college prices considering of their satisfaction with the make and the products, and that loyal customers are valuable marketing agents, as their recommendations to friends and family provide free referral business.

10. Primary Customer Officeholder 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine

Author Jeanne Bliss is a thought leader on the part of customer leadership -- like the Chief Customer Officeholder, for case. Her book outlines the five competencies she uses to evaluate and bus client-driven executives to plough customers into a growth engine -- just they're useful principles to apply as guiding north stars, no matter what stage of your career:

  • Accolade and manage your customers as assets
  • Align around customer experience
  • Build a client listening path
  • Proactive experience reliability and innovation
  • Leadership, accountability, and culture

11. Customer Loyalty: How to Earn Information technology, How to Go along It

In this volume, author Jill Griffin delivers really practical, piece of cake-to-implement advice nearly, well, what the title suggests: how to earn and maintain customer loyalty. Each section focuses on a different stage of the customer experience, and how to prioritize loyalty in each phase -- such as how to turn a first-fourth dimension buyer into a repeat customer, how to prevent client loss when yous detect signs of churn, and more.

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

Authored by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness is another case study of a company made successful by its exceptional customer service. The book chronicles Zappos' one-of-a-kind company culture and commitment to customer experience that'southward made it as big as information technology is today.

Hsieh actually believes that company civilization is a determining gene and predictor of your business organisation' success -- and the kind of service your customers will receive. Similar the authors of Uncommon Service, Hsieh advocates for choosing ane thing to do uncommonly well, instead of trying to exist boilerplate at everything. And that i thing, he argues, should be customer service.

Leadership Books

These books aren't written strictly for customer-facing professionals, but they offer valuable lessons for leaders at the head of client-facing teams, besides every bit ideas for influencing and building trust with the customers you serve.

13. The Hard Truth About Soft Skills: Workplace Lessons Smart People Wish They'd Learned Sooner

"Hard skills" are technical skills and expertise, but writer and career coach Peggy Klaus things "soft skills" are even more than important to career growth -- skills like workload direction, giving and receiving feedback, developing a make, and more.

These soft skills are relevant for any client service or success professional person seeking to grow their career, and eventually, lead a team.

xiv. Commencement With Why: How Groovy Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Another good read for anyone trying to build a career, writer and speaker Simon Sinek's book details how successful leaders tin inspire others to rally behind a cause or a mission -- and accomplish it.

Sinek believes in the importance of putting the "why" before the "how" or the "what." In other words, successful leaders should focus on getting everyone on board with the purpose before diving into the process or product.

This is valuable guidance for leaders of teams and for client-facing professionals in full general. Past focusing on the "why" of your customer, you will be able to more effectively navigate conversations to build rapport and trust with them, which volition let y'all to build a mutually beneficial human relationship and inspire their loyalty -- to you and your brand.

15. Emotional Intelligence 2.0

You're probably already familiar with the concept of emotional intelligence -- the ability to empathize and manage the needs and feelings of others, besides as yourself, and to answer appropriately.

This volume takes these concepts farther, with authors Travis Bradberry, Jean Greaves, and Patrick Lencioni that provides helpful tools, tips, and frameworks for edifice your emotional intelligence components. It even includes a helpful interactive quiz, which identifies your strengths and areas for improvement and so yous can focus on making the biggest bear on on your EQ equally possible.

16. How to Win Friends and Influence People

Dale Carnegie'south famous book still stands the test of fourth dimension, and information technology's worth a read for anyone brushing up on their leadership and people skills -- at work, or in your personal life.

You tin can read a detailed summary of the book here, just below are some of the principles well-nigh applicable to someone building a customer-focused career:

  • Give honest and sincere appreciation.
  • Be a skilful listener.
  • Brand the other person feel important.
  • If you are incorrect, acknowledge it quickly and emphatically.
  • Effort honestly to come across things from the other person's point of view.

Writing Books

No affair what your job, it's likely that it volition involve a fair scrap of writing -- and fifty-fifty if you're only writing emails in your role, information technology's of import to have a few skills in your back pocket earlier you lot press "send." And customer-facing professionals have to spend a lot of time emailing their customers. Hither are a few helpful books to read to brush upwardly on your written advice skills:

17. Everybody Writes: Your Go-to Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

Writer Ann Handley'southward book is my blogging must-read -- in fact, information technology sits on my desk-bound at work. Her actionable tips and guides are easy to implement in your solar day-to-day writing, likewise every bit in your content creation (for example, if you write knowledge guide content or weblog posts for a customer blog).

This book is made up of 74 short chapters, then it's piece of cake to flip through while you're writing unlike things. Her suggestions for writing social media copy are specially helpful -- and she encourages making sure to accommodate tone and content for each platform and apply instance.

18. May I Have Your Attending, Please? Your Guide to Business concern Writing That Charms, Captivates and Converts

Business writing doesn't take to be boring, according to author Mish Slade. This volume provides a ton of ideas and techniques for making every single discussion of your copy remarkable -- from your website to your social channels to your emails.

These tips are specifically about trying to read customers' minds -- to answer their questions clearly and concisely, which is why they're likely looking at your website in the first place. Tips for clarity and writing with enthusiasm will be of particular employ for customer service professionals writing social media customer service copy, or knowledge base content.

19. On Writing Well: The Archetype Guide to Writing Nonfiction

A staple for whatever nonfiction writer, this book by William Zinsser teaches readers that everyone can larn to write well -- and that the keys to writing well are communicating authentic personality and helpful data. The principles in this book will teach readers how to write clearly and effectively to share important data, while even so being engaging and creative in the process.

twenty. Several Short Sentences About Writing

Another quick-hits read, author and New York Times editorial board fellow member Verlyn Klinkenborg breaks down the minutiae of sentence construction to give readers a helpful guide to storytelling. As the title might already suggest, she advocates for writing short sentences in order to practice writing longer ones, so you can write content that'due south stiff and balanced, and not unwieldy.

This helps create reader clarity -- which is critical when you're using writing to educate and communicate with customers.

What are your must-read client service books? Share them with me on Twitter.

Net Promoter, Internet Promoter Arrangement, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Visitor, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

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Originally published Mar 20, 2018 viii:00:00 AM, updated June 09 2021