REVIEW: What’s the Secret? To Providing a World-Class Customer Experience – 4.5 out of 5

Posted by Lesley Hays

John DiJulius is the authority on customer service and this book, “What’s the Secret?”, proves it. If you’ve ever wondered why good service is so hard to find these days, why your employees don’t get it or why some companies seem to be able to charge whatever they like… you’ll find the answers in here!

Why I liked it

Throughout the book, it’s easy to understand how the information relates to your own company and how you could implement it yourself. Plus, it’s filled with graphs, lists and diagrams, which I love!

In particular, DiJulius makes it very clear how customer service needs to come from the top down (through processes, standards and training) and how it depends on everyone in your company, in all departments.

My favourite bits (what I learnt):

Great customer service starts with an outstanding internal company culture. [Pg 113]

“Customer satisfaction” is the wrong metric by which to measure your customer service results. Customers who experience no problems might be satisfied, but only highly satisfied—wowed, impressed or happily surprised—customers are more loyal and spend more money. [Pg 277]

Employees can only provide the level of customer service that they’ve experienced themselves. Apart from sending new hires off to stay at the Versace for a night, you can develop processes, measurement tools and staff training to show them how, rather than just saying “smile at the customers!” or “why can’t you give better service?”. [Pg 28]

Try giving employees more inspiring job titles to connect them to their customers. Would you rather be a hotel receptionist or an Escape Ambassador? An account manager or a Trusted Advisor? [Pg 103]

Wow your clients or customers through Secret Service… remember their last coffee order, wish them a happy birthday or ask how the football game was on the weekend (that they’d casually mentioned they were going to a number of weeks ago!). Keep notes and make them say “How’d they know that?”! [Pg 151]

What would have improved it?

There are a lot of suggestions in this book and it would have been nice to have a better summary of what I need to do now, soon and over the long term. I’d have also appreciated “action items” pulled out from all the fascinating examples, so I could see what was just inspiring and what was something to I could do.

I can’t wait to start trying these ideas out at Bluewire Media and, if you currently work with us (or might in the future), I’m sure you’re interested in seeing what we come up with, too!

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If you want to discover the secret to implementing world-class customer service in your own company, check out the book at Amazon: What’s the Secret? To providing a world-class customer experience.