Why should you train your employees for service excellence? The service experience that your customer has just undertaken, or is about to undertake, will determine much more than whether or not they come back to you in the future.

That service experience dictates how quickly they come back, how many colleagues they share the story with, and how likely they are to be up-sold or cross-sold. But it doesn’t end there. It also has a lasting effect on the person who is delivering the service.  The more positive experiences your employees have with customers, the more likely they are to have additional positive experiences with customers. It all culminates into a giant ripple effect that makes or breaks businesses without them ever knowing about it, or recognizing the source.

Nancy Friedman’s newest book How to Get Your Customers Swearing by You, Not at You (HRD Press, 2008) lays out the blueprint for optimized service training. This is not a rah-rah book on service filled with hyperbolic talk and motivational queues. Nor is it someone else’s miraculous success story about an incident in which their excellent service saved the company with no relevance to what you, the reader, can do.

What makes this book special is that it is completely applicable. How to Get Your Customers Swearing by You, Not at You is a rare treat – a book that skips the “see what I did” approach and instead spends every page on how to get your own organization to a level of service excellence through effective training on the topic. Written to a managerial or training audience, the chapters are broken into sections on needs recognition, effective design and budgeting for service training, role playing, service training delivery, and evaluating your efforts once the employees have returned to the job. 

If you’ve ever met author Nancy Friedman, or have had the chance to hear her speak you know about her energy and passion for service excellence. The Telephone Doctor, as she is better known, has become a brand unto herself. With a 20 year track record of success she has now laid the blueprint for service success.  Her desire for your success comes through the pages cleanly and crisply as a how-to for organizations who know that they want to achieve the highest levels of service success, but who may be unsure of how to get there. Highly recommended.