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Customer Service Tip of the Week: Over 52 ideas and reminders to sharpen your skills
DIAMOND
RATING
RATING
Jeff Toister, Toister Performance Solutions (2018)
Senteo’s Review 
With the book Customer Service Tip of the Week: Over 52 ideas and reminders to sharpen your skills, author Jeff Toister has created a unique guide of useful tips which emphasize customer service skills that also trickle into relationship building. Jeff Toister is a customer experience author, consultant, and trainer. Over 500,000 people have taken one of his courses on LinkedIn Learning. He’s been named a top customer experience influencer by Unymira, Panviva, and LiveHelpNow.
Customer Service Tip of the week, began exactly how it sounds as a tip of the week which Toister would send out to members of his customer service courses. This book has aggregated all of the useful skill building tips which Toister has come up with and gives one unique place to access and acquire a plethora of knowledge on best practice customer service techniques.
This book is a unique resource which provides an abundance of information and useful skill development in a relatively short text. It is designed to be easy to read from cover-to-cover or to be used for developing specific skills and filling existing holes. It contains an introduction and six chapters, which are designated by a theme and specific tips. The introduction and first chapter introduce you to the main topics, ideas and fundamentals of customer experience. Furthermore, the tips are also combined into sections known as “challenges” for the customer service professional which include points such as “delivering memorable ‘wow’ experiences” or “serving difficult or upset customers” or even “new job or new role within the company”.
This book does a great job in providing its advice and information in a succinct and straight to the point style. Moreover, the book is well-organized by theme, easy to read and to find specific tips. The tips themselves aren’t long, and can be easily digested and implemented by teams, even in real time if needed.
While the book provides many useful tips to develop customer service skills, it misses a key development in the customer service world which is not just that you need to have good etiquette while providing customer service, but that this is in fact a process of relationship building. Thus, the real drawback to this book is not anything in particularly which it does wrong, but a critic of the fact that there should be more of an emphasis on the particular aspect of relationship mending and building throughout the tips.
As well, they could do a better job of defining the difference between good customer service (fulfilling the general contractual obligations between customer and company in an efficient and pleasing manner) and good customer experiences (exceeding customer expectations in a manner that is unique, engaging, and memorable). It seems they do not differentiate between the two.
Finally, due to this books target audience being frontline workers, the recommendations provided seem to be isolated and really do not lead to any systemized solutions or overall operating model changes. Often it is unclear how the recommendations might be related and even integrated. It seems to be more of a book for the front line working directly with customers rather than strategy or operational leaders looking to build scalable solutions across large organizations.
Reinforce your customer service skills!
The best customer service professionals know it takes consistent focus to serve customers at the highest level. Whether you want to deliver world-class customer service or just get back to the basics, Customer Service Tip of the Week is your resource for proven tips, ideas, and techniques.
Thousands of customer service professionals from all around the world read the weekly Customer Service Tip of the Week email. Now you can get more than 52 of the most popular tips all in one book. Use these tips to build rapport, exceed customer expectations, and solve tough problems.
- Select tips by category, by specific challenge, or just go in order.
- Each tip includes a short explanation plus practical suggestions.
- Focus on one tip per week to sharpen your skills over time.
Customer service leaders will find additional resources for sharing the tips with your team!
This is a must read for anyone who works with the public, even if their title does not include “customer service”. It provides valuable skills and insights which lead to better service or service development depending on who is reading the book.
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