The Service Culture Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Employees Obsessed with Customer Service

Easy, no, something a company can do: YES! The Service Culture Handbook is a book that acts as a guide to defining “exceptional customer service” and the work required to make it happen. The book is loaded with examples of both the enablers and potential pitfalls that may be encountered along the way. It also includes tangible activities and tools to help each company shape the service culture that is right for their organization and customers. The fact that the handbook clearly states “Culture is not a side project. It’s a way of doing business that should be integrated into everything you do…” makes it clear that it is a journey that requires effort both to create it and then sustain it!

This book is the absolute best customer experience book I have read to date! It was so good I bought additional copies for people in my company. I was even compelled to reach out to the author to thank him for writing it! The book does an amazing job of informing you not only about customer experience but also providing step by step actions you can take to implement what you've read. I could not recommend this book anymore highly.

I've read a lot of books like this and many are filled with anecdotes and platitudes that are worth pondering but provide little in the way of practical things that can improve your company. This book is different, with several well thought out procedures and examples of how to actually implement the creation of a vision statement and ways to develop workplace culture. The chapters are well thought out and follow a logical progression. Plenty here not only to ponder but to actually do. Well worth your time.

I had the privilege of reading this book and talking to the author, Jeff Toister. Jeff is awesome, and he is very knowledgable when it comes to customer service. One of my favorite parts of the book is Chapter 7. Jeff deconstructs the importance of hiring people who'll embrace your culture. Being a business owner myself, that was insightful for me to read. I'd recommend this book to any business owner who's looking to improve the way they interact with customers.

There's no easy to say this, but... if your company and/or team culture sucks, no amount of training, coaching, or plucked-from-thin-air engagement strategies are going to do it. Oh, and if you think you can just replicate the successes of other companies, keep on dreamin'. It's overwhelming, I know. But here's the deal - it doesn't have to be and this book will show you why. Why is culture important and why do so many initiatives fail? What is culture? What does it look like within the context of your team or company? How do you align your company's goals around culture? How do hire and train the right people? The answer to these questions, and so much more, are found in this book. Oh, and one last thing. This is not some dreary academic text with prose baked in Ambien. Jeff writes with a very conversational tone which makes this book an easy read.

I enjoyed the insightful and different ways of looking at customer service (just the first part of the book. The section on culture and hiring also had one or more excellent insights), such as that there can be multiple levels of culture within an organization. Another book by Jeff Toister that ought to be required reading for business school (edit: at least for this book, gradeschool).

I have a whole career that says quality/improvement initiatives rarely work. Every company I worked for was ISO 9001 compliant and had a highly compensated Quality Manager to prove it. “Pencil whip” is a verb. This book acknowledges those problems and provides various solutions. My skepticism remains that the companies I worked for would actually use them. Analyzing and discussing ideas is fun. It’s never too late to improve. I’m not so impressed by the “heroic effort” touted early in this book. It usually indicates a failure in the system that remains uncorrected. Because it usually makes a great story, it is self-serving. The boy’s lost stuffed animal that goes on a photo journey is heartwarming. Does every single boy deserve and expect this same level of “heroic effort”? This reminds me of people who give large checks to charity if they can get their picture in the newspaper. “It is easy to copy something in form but not as easy to capture the spirit that makes it work.” Mito, S. (1990). The Honda Book of Management, p. 31 Good advice tends to come out as mere platitude. Our brains seem to be wired for pattern recognition and storytelling. Consider the difference between “Don’t lie” and “The story of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’”. The numerous stories in the book are excellent. Self-interst. There is always the conflict between serving our self-interest and societies demand for ethical behavior (going against our self-interest). Commonly, people loudly proclaim that everyone else is required to be ethical while always promoting their own self-interest. Only one out of every ten employees can get promoted. The “one” is obvious. In theory every service you offer for sale should be defined and achievable. Is getting the customer a bottle of whisky an available service? How about driving fifty miles to the nearest In-N-Out for a hamburger (that needs to be kept warm). Is that an available service? There must be a line somewhere. Is “heroic service” always good? There is little mention of tipping, which means the server is using company time and resources for personal gain. There are some examples of worthwhile “heroic effort”. I believe there should have been more emphasis on Root Cause Analysis and The Five Whys for every failure. That prevents future failures. Just saying “you can’t change the past” and forgetting about failures is bad policy. I’m not impressed by managers who want a list of the three or five most common failures, minimum a hundred or thousand, and think that is adequate. They are willing to throw a customer with a unique failure under the bus (unless they are politically connected). Your product shouldn’t fail. That is the basis of great service. Most companies have an inch thick rule book of “you can’t do that”. So what is a server supposed to do when accommodating a customer would break a rule? What if the boss has specifically emphasized getting things done as quickly and cheaply as possible? I have personally never seen an employee manual that empowered employees. Power is wielded by management. Work is done by employees. Chapter 9 describes empowering employees. “… the company provides employees with the tools, resources, and authority to serve their customers at the highest level.” Nice examples of how the measured variable is optimized, usually by gaming the system (95% customer satisfaction). The author is aware of how thing go wrong. The books emphasis on company culture is well founded. Hiring honest, enthusiastic well socialized people is important. Chapter 7 describes how to do this. The next chapter tells about training/refreshing existing employees in customer culture. The book mentions several companies with excellent company culture. An approach to writing a vision statement is given. It is unfortunate that sustained senior management buy-in is necessary for improvement programs to work, as it rarely occurs. Chapters 10 and 12 describe management buy-in. You will have to buy the book to find the joke in Chapter 11.

I am an experienced org change consultant. Jeff has thought thru the main components of designing and leading a cUstomer service change process that also can have dramatic culture change effects and benefits when done effectively. The next wave of this work can and should include driving customer focus in the context of driving other useful change for other stakeholders in an enterprise, namely the team members, the suppliers, the community, the environment, and the investor.

I have over 20+ years of customer-service experience...yet as a soft-skills trainer I was unable to come up with the points and material to 'teach' the subject! The book is highly informative, an easy read, and helped me to develop two modules on customer-service. Thanks!

We are all reading this at work. It is a good read and very useful for customer service culture.

Great read

El libro explica claramente los pasos que debes seguir para implementar cultura de servicio en cualquier organización. Muy útil.

Disappointed