The Customer Service Zoo — Catherine DeVrye Here is a light-hearted approach to the perennial challenges of customer service, told with the charm and experience of Australia's most innovative expert, Catherine Devrye. It's a parable about making the most of your situation, about looking after yourself, about thinking creatively, and, of course, about using common sense, which will make a difference to your customer service. Why We Buy — Paco Underhill Paco Underhill and his detail-oriented band of retail researchers have camped out in stores over the course of 20 years, dedicating their lives to the "science of shopping." Armed with an array of video equipment, store maps, and customer-profile sheets, the author and his team have observed over 900 aspects of interaction between shopper and store. Dealing With People You Can't Stand : How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst — Rick Brinkman, Rick Kirschner Shows how to bring out the best in people at their worst. There will always be some people who resist change in all sorts of strange and nasty ways. Step by step details of how to communicate with several types of "difficult" people--from the whiner to the know-it-all. Outrageous! : Unforgettable Service...Guilt-Free Selling — T. Scott Gross It's sort of a rewrite of his 1991 "Positively Outrageous Service", but the new one is more "hands on" than the first.

To grow a company organically at the lowest revenue capture cost, business owners must set aside their egos, understand their buyer’s objectives based on research, and communicate in a format that targeted buyers can understand and respond to. The “secret” to growing your product or service business is managing the intersection of the knowledge needed to understand why your prospects buy (or don’t buy) and the knowledge needed to sell and market to your prospects.

Time to face the facts. Given nothing to prove them wrong, here’s what your prospects believe - one business is just like another. Any accountant can complete my tax return, any electrician can install a ceiling fan, and any restaurant can fill me up. Now, I didn’t say it was true. In fact, you know it’s not true. But there you sit, doing nothing about it. If you can’t find a way to differentiate your business from every other business that says it does what you do, and if you can’t communicate that difference in a way that really matters to a narrow target market, then you’re basically in the commodity business. If I can’t tell how one business is different than another, then I will use the only thing I can measure – price. Yes, the driving force in the commodity business is always price. In case you haven’t discovered this yet, price is a crappy place to compete. I assure you that there is someone out there willing to go out of business faster than you. So how do you get out of the commodity business?