  | Book Details Title: Ignore Your Customers (and They’ll Go Away): The Simple Playbook for Delivering the Ultimate Customer Service Experience |
Book DescriptionReview “Micah Solomon has cracked the code of world-class customer service. Ignore Your Customers (And They’ll Go Away) will guide your transformation in putting the customer first.”– DANIEL H. PINK, author of When and Drive“Micah Solomon is my go-to expert on exceptional customer service and building a customer-focused culture. In Ignore Your Customers (And They’ll Go Away), he reveals the secrets of how anyone, in any industry, can get a leg up on creating both-and he does so with his trademark humor, business sense, and clear eyesight.”–HERVE HUMLER, Co-founder and Emeritus Chairman, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company“This unique book distills Micah Solomon’s long-tenured customer service consulting career through the lens of some of the greatest companies of our time. You will benefit greatly, as we have here at JetBlue.”– FRANKIE LITTLEFORD, JetBlue Airways’ Vice President, Customer Support Experience, Operations and Recovery “Customer experience can make or break your success. Ignore Your Customers (And They’ll Go Away) is an invaluable playbook for how to prioritize what matters: your employees, your customers, and the virtuous cycle that keeps them both coming back for more.”– DANNY MEYER, CEO, Union Square Hospitality Group; Founder, Shake Shack; Author, Setting the Table “A great guide to turning your customer service around.” — TONY HSIEH, CEO of Zappos, New York Times bestselling author of Delivering Happiness“At a time when customer service seems like a dying art, Micah Solomon delivers the perfect book for anyone who cares about the work.”– SETH GODIN, Author, This is Marketing “It’s been our experience at Safelite AutoGlass, year after year, that following the game plan Micah lays out in these pages can lead to doubling, even tripling, of our financial success metrics, even in the face of challenging economic times and factors.”— TOM FEENEY, President and CEO, Safelite AutoGlass (from the preface) Small Business Trends Quadruple Five-Star Review Overall rating: 5 stars * Usefulness: 5 stars * Content: 5 stars * Freshness: 5 stars Reviewed by Anita Campbell, January 19, 2020“This is a supremely useful book, a truly practical guide for transforming your customer service approach-and results. It’s not just for big brands; small business owners and customer service staff can learn from it; you can simply start implementing techniques right away and see results. Backed with the authority and insights of years of experience, a key feature that makes this book unique is that it is laid out with actionable advice, including what the author calls cheat sheets, i.e., lists of techniques to use, business book group reading guides, questions and prompts.” Read more From the Inside Flap Chapter by Chapter: What You’ll Learn inside Ignore Your Customers (and They’ll Go Away) Throughout this book, I’ll be both your instructor and your cheerleader, helping you avoid the missteps that lead to alienated customers and showing you the positive steps that will put you on track to surpass your competition. Here’s a glimpse of what I’ll be covering in the pages to come. In Chapter 1, I’ll push you to create an ideal state at your company that I call “automatic positivity,” where the answer to any customer question is expected to be yes. As a bonus, we’ll spend time in this chapter with Tony Hsieh, the innovative CEO of Zappos, to see how this default of positivity plays out in the Zappos world. In Chapter 2, I’ll start by defining “customer service culture,” and then we’ll get to work building a superior one for your own organization. This is fundamental, essential work. In Chapter 3, I’ll dig into the all-important subject of talent management: the selection, care, and nurturing of employees. We’ll look at the mindset and methodologies that will equip you to successfully recruit, select, and get the most out of the employees who power your company and its relationship with customers. In Chapter 4, we’ll focus on creating “wow” customer experiences, looking at how these moments of wow come about and where they can lead a company, its customers, and its employees. This chapter isn’t all platitudes and happy talk; we’ll look at the serious work and hard-to-achieve corporate mindset required to make these magical moments happen (and even delineate the occasions–there are some–where trying to wow a customer might be the wrong strategy). In Chapter 5, we’ll look at the experience part of the customer experience, taking a visit to Drybar, the coast-to-coast “blowout bar” salon phenomenon that has grown from just one to 125 locations over the course of a very few years, and look at how Drybar manages to impart emotional resonance to the most mundane of acts: blow-drying a client’s hair. We’ll also look briefly at one of the world’s legendary healthcare institutions, the Mayo Clinic, which has done great work on improving the customer (patient) experience in this most serious of settings. In Chapter 6, I’ll show you how to consistently deliver great customer service by creating essential standards and systems. Although the subject may sound unsexy, this chapter contains some of the most important lessons in this book. We’ll kick off Chapter 7 by visiting with Sir Richard Branson, who will help us dig into the dangers of “Stepford Customer Service.” This feeds into the chapter’s theme: how to shake the cob-webs and artifice from your customer service approach and create an authentic style of service: one that avoids repelling customers through excessive formality and other cues that convey insincerity. Customers are a moving target, and the customer landscape has been changing rapidly, particularly since the advent of the digital communications revolution. While this is an undercurrent that runs through much of this book, it’s the particular focus of Chapter 8. Here we’ll look at how digital communications and the accelerating pace of consumer life have changed the expectations of your customers, and I’ll provide pointers on how to successfully align the customer experience with these new realities. Every hour that they’re awake, customers and prospects are busy sharing their opinions and impressions of your business. Chapter 9 takes a look at how the hypersocial inclinations of today’s customers are affecting your business and how to make the most of these social connections to influence purchasing decisions and overall customer happiness. Moving on to Chapter 10, I explain how to avoid the hazards of the deadly cliff of dissatisfaction: the point at which customers lose patience with your company’s speed of service. If you fail to keep customers away from this death-dealing cliff, there’s no amount of warmth and empathy and no number of heartfelt apologies that can ever entirely compensate. This brings us to Chapter 11, where I briefly wrap things up. ALSO INCLUDED: Special material throughout on diversity and inclusion from Jan Jones Blackhurst, EVP at Caesars International and Michael Hyter, renowned author of The Power of Inclusion Each chapter concludes with a Business Reading Group Guide and a point-by-point summary to maximize reader memory retention and make every insight actionable. Read more About the Author Micah Solomon is one of today’s best-known customer service and customer experience consultant and speaker. Known as “the customer service turn-around expert,” companies in every industry call on him to transform their customer service and build a true customer service culture.Micah is one of the world’s leading authorities on customer service, company culture, and the customer experience. He’s a bestselling author, customer service consultant, and popular keynote speaker. Additionally, he’s a Senior Contributor for Forbes and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review, as well as on ABC and CBS. Micah is a business leader and entrepreneur himself, and was an early investor in the technology behind Apple’s Siri. His broad expertise includes the hospitality industry, healthcare (patient experience), AI (artificial intelligence), retail, automotive, manufacturing, technology, banking, finance, nonprofit, and government.He can be reached by readers at micah@micahsolomon.com – micahsolomon.com – (484) 343-5881 Read more Customers Review: “Ignore Your Customers and They‘ll Go Away” is well researched, well considered, and well written. It not only provides excellent advice for any organization with customers (i.e., every organization), but includes suggestions and resources—such as readers’ “cheat sheets” and reading group guides—to help you get there. He also includes notes on diversity and inclusion in recruiting, selecting, and managing your team, something every twenty-first century business should be thinking about.I can’t think of a better way to give you a better idea of how thorough the book is than to look at the overview Micah provides in the Introduction. I won’t synopsize chapter-by-chapter as he does, but here’s a list of the topics he covers:• Defaulting to yes when dealing with customers (“automatic positivity”)• Defining a customer service culture for your organization• Talent management: The selection, care, and nurturing of employees• Creating wow experiences, including when it’s not a good idea• Customer experience ranging from hair salons to the Mayo Clinic• Avoiding robotic, boring Stepford customer service• How digital life has accelerated communication and changed customer expectations• Making the most of customers’ social connections• How to keep the organization from driving like Thelma and Louise, off the “cliff of dissatisfaction.”This book is meant to be shared, especially with your team at work. It’s not a “dry eyeballs” business book; it’s filled with real life stories, real life humor, and real life experiences.In an age when it’s tempting (and possible) to put customer service on automatic pilot and distance ourselves from our customers, Micah Solomon gives us the reasons and the ways to avoid doing so.Is there room for improvement? Of course, but overall, this book nails it. Six words: Buy it. Read it. Do it.Disclaimer: I received an advance copy of the book in hardcover. I purchased the Kindle version for myself so that I can refer to it anywhere and often.
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46 reviews