You lot've probably heard i of the more famous -isms in the world earlier: "The customer is always correct."

But you probably also know that "the customer is always correct," isn't the only primal to making customers and so happy they stick around. There are a variety of other philosophies, strategies, and tools customer-facing professionals and teams can use to turn customers into loyal promoters and advocates.

Simply how do you lot learn everything you need to know to turn yourself -- and your team -- into a loftier-performing customer happiness engine?

There are a lot of things you can larn on the job when yous work in customer service. But sometimes, it's faster to learn from an skilful, so you can have their learnings after years of research and experience, and immediately implement them in your ain workflow.

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Peruse this book list to learn from the experts virtually customer service, customer success, leadership, and writing. All of these books contain valuable insights for anyone working in a customer-facing office, then pick 1 to become started on improving your knowledge then y'all can become an expert, too.

xx Peak Customer Service Books

Customer Service Books

Read these books to learn about how to create an exceptional customer experience -- featuring real-earth example studies and time-tested methods created by industry thought leaders.

i. Uncommon Service: How to Win past Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

Authors Frances Frei and Anne Morriss contend that, in order to provide exceptional client service, you demand to practise other things less-than-exceptionally. That's right: The authors advocate for underperforming in one expanse of your business organisation in order to excel at customer service -- considering, they argue, you tin't do everything well.

The authors encourage businesses to identify what their customers value most, prioritize excelling in that business function, and have that this prioritization will upshot in underperformance in other areas. They argue that client service will become a competitive differentiator for customers trying to choose among many different options, and then this tough truth is also a necessary i.

ii. The Nordstrom Way to Customer Feel Excellence: Creating a Values-Driven Service Culture

Nordstrom has set the standard for customer happiness in the sea of its other department store competitors, so authors Robert Spector and BreAnne O. Reeves literally wrote the book on how they did it.

Key insights from Nordstrom include empowering self-motivated employees to go the actress mile to brand customers happy, to prioritize ease-of-use for your customers beyond every touchpoint they have with your brand, and to always think like the customer to build a customer-centric brand on every team and function within your business concern.

3. The Amazement Revolution: Seven Client Service Strategies to Create an Amazing Customer (and Employee) Experience

Authored by customer service idea leader Shep Hyken, this book offers seven practical strategies to improve customer happiness and loyalty, including cultivating partnership with customers, providing unique membership awards, and building community with customers.

This book is all steak and no sizzle, with tons of practical ideas and strategies supported by real-world examples that readers can take into work with them equally presently as they read.

4. Hug Your Haters: How to Encompass Complaints and Keep Your Customers

Author Jay Baer wrote Hug Your Haters for a modern customer service system that isn't simply congenital on the telephone or electronic mail, but on social media and on messaging apps, besides. Baer implores readers to build their customer service organization effectually these digital channels, where the majority of customers share their rave reviews -- as well every bit their complaints.

In the book, Baer teaches readers how to handle your haters and your trolls, how to measure customer service productivity, the impacts of non addressing customer complaints, and how to use his frameworks for responding to customers complaints across a variety of online channels.

5. The New Gilded Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company

If you're non familiar with the Ritz-Carlton's famous customer service policy, it'due south pretty legendary: Every single employee, no matter what their office, has the discretion to spend up to $2,000 per day to better customer experience.

This policy, and the principles and foundations backside it, have built the brand a legion of loyal customers, and in this book, author Joseph Michelli explains how other brands can build a similarly memorable brand and client experience -- using principles like "empower [employees] through trust," "get out a lasting footprint," and "define and refine [the feel you want customers to accept]."

half dozen. The Give thanks You lot Economy

Marketing mogul and author Gary Vaynerchuk regularly talks about the importance of 1:1 communication in marketing -- and his philosophies extend to the customer service world, as well.

In this book, Vaynerchuk writes that the era of pocket-size courtesies is returning to the concern world, now that social media has enabled businesses to communicate more intimately across different channels. He also writes that, if businesses don't pursue 1:1 customer care and date, they'll lose business concern to their competitors. This book will make you retrieve about how to use the power of engineering science to more finer abound and scale relationships with customers around the world.

vii. What Customers Require: How to Create Relevant and Memorable Experiences at Every Touchpoint

Author Nicholas Webb has some things to say about the current state of client experience: "Allow'due south face up it: Today, most client experience programs are a disaster."

Webb things only businesses that offer "optimal" customer service will survive -- and that nearly businesses are a long way off from achieving that. The main reason, Webb argues, is because the technological innovations of the concluding few decades accept made it easier for businesses to treat and review customers like information points, instead of treating them like existent people.

Webb calls for reviewing each touchpoint a customer shares with your business, and evaluating what you can do, both online and offline, to ameliorate each step of that experience. Optimizing each phase of the customer experience, instead of making broad-strokes changes, will satisfy individualistic customers who won't be satisfied by the bare minimum.

Customer Success Books

These books are about taking customer service to the side by side level -- into customer success. Once y'all've started solving your customers' problems and helping guide them toward other solutions and strategies for achieving their goals with your product or service, you can starting time building a customer success program -- one that helps your customers succeed so your business succeeds, and turns your happy customers into your loyal advocates and evangelists.

8. Customer Success: How Innovative Companies are Reducing Churn and Growing Acquirement

Authored by some of the pioneers of the customer success motility, this is the definitive book to read to become the lay of the client success land -- focused squarely on improving client loyalty, decreasing churn, and adapting to the appearance of the subscription economy.

The book focuses primarily on subscription-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses, but the principles and ideas they explore are relevant to whatsoever industry or business. A key concept that'south explored over again and again is customer loyalty -- and specifically, behavioral vs. attitudinal loyalty. Attitudinal loyalty, the authors explicate, is loyalty when customers beloved a particular brand or product, and information technology's ideal -- but difficult to reach.

9. The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Backside Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value

This book is authored by Frederick Reichheld -- one of the creators of the Cyberspace Promoter Score® -- the landmark client happiness and loyalty metric many businesses use today. And similar the NPS, the ideas originally published by Reichheld dorsum in 1996 are some of the most widely-shared beliefs in the customer service and success spaces today.

Chief among his findings and arguments include the finding that loyal customers are cheaper to service than non-loyal customers, that loyal customers are typically more than willing to pay higher prices because of their satisfaction with the brand and the products, and that loyal customers are valuable marketing agents, as their recommendations to friends and family provide gratuitous referral business organisation.

x. Principal Customer Officeholder 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine

Author Jeanne Bliss is a thought leader on the part of client leadership -- like the Main Customer Officer, for example. Her book outlines the five competencies she uses to evaluate and autobus customer-driven executives to turn customers into a growth engine -- but they're useful principles to utilize equally guiding north stars, no matter what stage of your career:

  • Laurels and manage your customers as assets
  • Align around customer feel
  • Build a customer listening path
  • Proactive experience reliability and innovation
  • Leadership, accountability, and culture

xi. Client Loyalty: How to Earn It, How to Keep It

In this book, author Jill Griffin delivers really applied, easy-to-implement advice almost, well, what the title suggests: how to earn and maintain customer loyalty. Each section focuses on a different stage of the customer experience, and how to prioritize loyalty in each stage -- such every bit how to turn a starting time-time buyer into a repeat customer, how to forbid customer loss when you notice signs of churn, and more.

12. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

Authored by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness is another instance written report of a company fabricated successful by its exceptional client service. The book chronicles Zappos' ane-of-a-kind company culture and commitment to customer experience that'south made it equally big as information technology is today.

Hsieh actually believes that company civilization is a determining factor and predictor of your business concern' success -- and the kind of service your customers will receive. Like the authors of Uncommon Service, Hsieh advocates for choosing one thing to do exceptionally well, instead of trying to be boilerplate at everything. And that one thing, he argues, should be customer service.

Leadership Books

These books aren't written strictly for customer-facing professionals, but they offer valuable lessons for leaders at the head of customer-facing teams, likewise equally ideas for influencing and building trust with the customers you lot serve.

13. The Difficult Truth About Soft Skills: Workplace Lessons Smart People Wish They'd Learned Sooner

"Hard skills" are technical skills and expertise, merely author and career coach Peggy Klaus things "soft skills" are even more important to career growth -- skills like workload management, giving and receiving feedback, developing a make, and more.

These soft skills are relevant for any customer service or success professional seeking to grow their career, and eventually, lead a squad.

14. Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Anybody to Take Action

Another good read for anyone trying to build a career, writer and speaker Simon Sinek'south book details how successful leaders tin inspire others to rally behind a cause or a mission -- and achieve it.

Sinek believes in the importance of putting the "why" earlier the "how" or the "what." In other words, successful leaders should focus on getting everyone on board with the purpose before diving into the process or production.

This is valuable guidance for leaders of teams and for customer-facing professionals in full general. By focusing on the "why" of your client, you will be able to more than effectively navigate conversations to build rapport and trust with them, which will allow you to build a mutually beneficial relationship and inspire their loyalty -- to you and your brand.

15. Emotional Intelligence 2.0

You're probably already familiar with the concept of emotional intelligence -- the power to understand and manage the needs and feelings of others, also as yourself, and to respond appropriately.

This volume takes these concepts further, with authors Travis Bradberry, Jean Greaves, and Patrick Lencioni that provides helpful tools, tips, and frameworks for building your emotional intelligence components. It even includes a helpful interactive quiz, which identifies your strengths and areas for comeback so you can focus on making the biggest impact on your EQ as possible.

sixteen. How to Win Friends and Influence People

Dale Carnegie's famous book even so stands the test of time, and information technology's worth a read for anyone brushing upward on their leadership and people skills -- at piece of work, or in your personal life.

You can read a detailed summary of the book here, merely below are some of the principles most applicable to someone edifice a customer-focused career:

  • Requite honest and sincere appreciation.
  • Be a good listener.
  • Make the other person feel of import.
  • If you are incorrect, acknowledge it quickly and emphatically.
  • Attempt honestly to run across things from the other person's point of view.

Writing Books

No thing what your task, it's likely that information technology will involve a fair bit of writing -- and even if you're but writing emails in your role, it's important to have a few skills in your back pocket before y'all press "send." And customer-facing professionals have to spend a lot of time emailing their customers. Here are a few helpful books to read to brush upwards on your written advice skills:

17. Everybody Writes: Your Go-to Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

Author Ann Handley's volume is my blogging must-read -- in fact, information technology sits on my desk-bound at piece of work. Her actionable tips and guides are easy to implement in your day-to-solar day writing, as well as in your content cosmos (for example, if you write knowledge guide content or blog posts for a customer blog).

This book is made up of 74 short chapters, so it's like shooting fish in a barrel to flip through while you're writing dissimilar things. Her suggestions for writing social media copy are peculiarly helpful -- and she encourages making sure to suit tone and content for each platform and use case.

xviii. May I Have Your Attending, Delight? Your Guide to Business Writing That Charms, Captivates and Converts

Business writing doesn't have to be boring, according to author Mish Slade. This book provides a ton of ideas and techniques for making every single discussion of your copy remarkable -- from your website to your social channels to your emails.

These tips are specifically near trying to read customers' minds -- to answer their questions clearly and concisely, which is why they're likely looking at your website in the first place. Tips for clarity and writing with enthusiasm volition be of particular use for client service professionals writing social media customer service re-create, or knowledge base content.

19. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

A staple for whatever nonfiction writer, this book by William Zinsser teaches readers that everyone can learn to write well -- and that the keys to writing well are communicating accurate personality and helpful information. The principles in this volume will teach readers how to write clearly and effectively to share important information, while still being engaging and creative in the process.

twenty. Several Short Sentences About Writing

Another quick-hits read, writer and New York Times editorial board member Verlyn Klinkenborg breaks downwards the minutiae of sentence structure to give readers a helpful guide to storytelling. Every bit the title might already advise, she advocates for writing short sentences in order to exercise writing longer ones, so you tin write content that's strong and counterbalanced, and non unwieldy.

This helps create reader clarity -- which is disquisitional when you're using writing to educate and communicate with customers.

What are your must-read customer service books? Share them with me on Twitter.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Organization, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

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Originally published Mar 20, 2018 8:00:00 AM, updated June 09 2021