What Customers Like About You

Once every few years a book comes along which compels managers around the world to sit up and totally re-evaluate their approach to achieving business success. What Customers Like About You is such a book. It confronts head-on many of the conventions of modern management, marketing and customer service and presents some fundamental challenges to current practice which can only be ignored at a company's peril.

Despite numerous customer service 'improvement programs', customer satisfaction levels are falling and complaints are rising. The decline in service levels is costing companies billions in lost revenue. Furthermore, many marketing initiatives to build customer 'relationships' and 'loyalty' are not only failing but proving counter-productive.

David Freemantle argues that in the age of hyper-competition there is a critical missing link — doing the things that your customers like. He shows that by adding emotional value (e-value) to everything a company and its people do, the probabilities of being liked by customers increases along with profitability. In a competitive world it is relatively easy to copy product and price, but it is virtually impossible to copy people and brand. Adding emotional value is at the heart of the debate about people management and customer service. Customer want to be liked by the people servicing them.

At a strategic level, companies need to choose and develop the emotional value they add to the brand and to the organization itself, while at an operational level front-line employees need to choose the emotional value they add to the transaction, whether this takes the form of fun or authenticity, friendliness or integrity. They need to get into the habit of getting out of the habit. Standing existing conversation on its head, the author argues that our obsession with systems, procedures and 'scientific management' when dealing with customers and employees can actually damage the relationship with them and threaten profitability. To achieve excellent customer service, rules have to be broken.

This book is based on an in-depth study of many companies across nineteen countries into what leads to success or failure in customer service. These companies that consistently excelled added emotional value with three attributes: Creativity, Emotional Connectivity, and Integrity.

David Freemantle examines these interrelated attributes in depth together with the underlying psychology necessary for developing them. In doing so, he highlights the three key motivators — Energy, Emotional Direction and Esprit — which enable front-line people to add emotional value to the service they provide.

This ground-breaking book will prove essential reading for any manager keen to discover the elusive missing links for delivering outstanding service. Like all of David Freemantle's previous best-seller What Customers Like About You is exceptionally easy to read, very stimulating and highly practical.

1. The importance of being liked
2. Adding emotional value
3. Likeable customer service
4. Emotional connectivity
5. The importance of integrity
6. Creative customer service
7. Everyday likeable behaviors
8. Influencing how customers feel about you
9. Why it isn't fashionable to be liked
10. The likeable organization
11. The likeable leader
12. Recruiting people your customers like
13. Training people to be liked by your customers
14. Dealing with customers you dislike
15. Finding out what your customers like
16. The one-hour course for adding emotional value

• Appendix I: Emotionally connected stars
• Appendix II: Suggested further reading
• Appendix III: Clusters
• Appendix IV: Emotions
• Appendix V: Emotional range
• Appendix VI: Customer service integrity tests

Is really about Customer Service. If you need the book, you shouldn't work with customers.