The Customer Service Survival Kit: What to Say to Defuse Even the Worst Customer Situations

If you are a CSR, a customer service manager, a customer service executive, a salesperson, educator, or business owner, you need to read, understand, and live by this book. This book captures at least four decades of the best customer service training principles into one concise, easy-to read, idea-packed location. I love this book for at least three reasons. First, Richard Gallagher's writing style captured the essence of good customer service. As you read the words, you can hear him having a conversation with you. The tone is extremely personal. It is not academic, authoritarian, nor aggressive. I felt that way from the opening chapter. Then, on page 136, in his discussion of using Social Media, he writes, "Instead, use genuine, accessible language - the kind you might use with a good friend over lunch." Richard Gallagher preaches what he practices and practices what he preaches. Back on page 22, I found the most important four words in the book: "He had my trust." These four words sum up the feeling every customer should experience with you and your organization. If your customers do not trust you, you lose. Gallagher then goes on in the following pages offering examples and strategies that show you how to build that trust. Finally, I love his teaching style. He tells stories about typical customer encounters that require a customer service survival kit, relates some typical "untrained" responses, offers a more customer friendly strategy and then challenges the readers to write out their method for handling specific sticky situations. The rest of the book then offers a multitude of techniques filled with common sense methods for handling a multitude of bad situations. This book is a winner.

This was exactly what I needed. I work at a Call Center and this book was very useful. It's helped me improve my call handling skills and I recommend it to everyone. I handle a lot of escalated cases and I wanted to improve my interaction with customers. (Less stressful calls, more control and handling) This book is more than just a few phrases, it also talks about actual techniques that you can practice. Some of them are already obvious but the book had enough new things that it was well worth the purchase.

Love this book, anyone working with the public should read this at least once.

Gets repetitive towards the end but good info.

I took a customer service job for a brief while and this book was recommended to me by one of my trainers. It's an interesting read, but I'm just not cut out to be a customer service rep. The book offers lots of helpful advice that can be used not only as a customer service rep, but also in everyday life.

Feel free to skip this book, if you want to be bullied, pushed over, and deal with a lot of stress. If you get the book, You don't need to finish the book. The material is relevant and actionable and works really well. From Page 1. You will want to finish it though. Because this stuff works. And works really well. Used it same day I started. Fantastic results. Highly Recommended.

This was bought for my own benefit, however as a manager in customer service I can say that I had to share it with my whole team. We have even gone as far as to use this as a guide when providing feedback to challenging situations (which we experience daily). There has been a noticiable difference in how we are able to now deal with those customers that are upset or frustrated. I would definitely tell anyone else that is looking for ways to handle any challenging interactions, either with customers or in life this book will help you deal with those situations very well. Maybe it one day we could have Mr. Gallagher come and deliver a training session to others in my company.

I have been trying to train my team with strategies to deal with challenging customers and I found this book very instructive and helpful.