Strategic Customer Service, 2nd Edition, is a road map and compelling business case for making service a strategic competitive edge. 

It is a wake-up call about how today’s customers, both consumers and businesses, have different and rapidly evolving service expectations based on their last best service transaction. 

Once viewed as solely the purview of the call center or the front line in a service organization, customer service has changed and requires everyone’s attention.

Today, only companies that embrace service as a competitive differentiator will survive. The book clearly outlines the causes for this phenomenon and identifies its remedies.

Happily, Zendesk recently identified Strategic Customer Service as one of the top customer service books to share with your CX team.

1. Customers today have many more choices than ever.
   • The more similar product choices customers have, the more they use problems and delighters with that product or outcome as their primary tool for differentiation and decision-making.
2. Today’s customers are much smarter buyers.
   • The Internet has not only been their source of a real-time buying education, it has become a channel for instant customer assessment, with other buyers becoming an information source for potential buyers.
3. Customers today get terrific service experiences in pockets of their life and use those experiences to judge other businesses.
   • That means your customer experience competition is not your industry only; it is any business that is creating great experiences for those you serve.

• If you are serving your customers pretty much like you did five years ago, then this book is for you.
• This book is not only for those in customer service.
• Those in marketing, operations, human resources, information technology, and finance all can benefit from this sharp analysis that distills decades of research on the impact of extraordinary versus mediocre customer service.

• Gather and analyze customer feedback;
• Convert customer feedback into a compelling business case;
• Empower employees to fix problems;
• Work with Quality, Customer Insights and IT to get quick wins;
• Track your impact on revenue;
• Generate sensational word of mouth;
• Tap opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell; and
• Much more…