In today’s intensely competitive business environment, breakthrough customer service gives your organization the last strategic edge. Selling more product or providing the lowest price are quick-fixes, easily copied by competitors. But breakthrough customer service is not a quick-fix program. It changes the rules of the way your company (or even your industry) does business. And it can differentiate your business from the competition in a lasting way.

Breakthrough Customer Service: Best Practices of Leaders in Customer Support assembles an outstanding group of contributors. In thirty-six chapters, the best of the best provide real-life, anecdotal proof that outstanding customer support really is possible and describe how they are doing it in their own, or their clients’, organizations. Divided into six parts, Breakthrough Customer Service covers the entire range of practices your organization needs to excel at:

• Developing strategy
• Establishing meaningful standards and measurements
• Improving processes that touch the customer
• Using state-of-the-art technology
• Managing the workforce (including empowerment, cross-functional teams, training, and leadership)
• Case studies of companies in several industry segments, showing how leading organizations pull together several of the concepts described in this book.

Best practices organizations don’t excel in only one area; no single thing distinguishes them. It’s the combination of practices—enabled by technology, with a pinch of organizational culture thrown in—that together create their uniqueness, and their leading position. If you want to grow and improve your business, learn from the best practices of others. With some minor adaptation, they will work within your organization’s culture to create breakthrough customer service.

Breakthrough Customer Service: Practices of Leaders in Customer Support enables you to learn from the very best. This book brings together an outstanding group of contributors—the leading individuals and companies that practise, provide, and teach the best practices in customer support including:

• Companies in North America and the United Kingdom, such as Eastman Kodak, British Airways, and AlliedSignal.
• First-hand stories of award-winners such as Ritz-Carlton and AMP, and advice from people who have judged these awards.
• Organizations that use the latest technology to support their customers (mbanx, Travelers Insurance) and other that are just beginning to climb the technology ladder.
• Leading consultants and thinkers from Coopers & Lybrand in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
• Suppliers, academics, associations, and industry magazines that have their pulse on selected industries and relevant practices.