People Love You: The Real Secret to Delivering Legendary Customer Experiences

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The Seven Essential Principles of Customer Engagement

Let’s get this straight from the get-go. You do not work for a perfect company or boss. Your product or service is flawed. Your support team, service delivery team, warehouse, billing department, help desk, technicians, engineers, installers, and so forth will make mistakes, show up late, and say stupid things to your customers. You will always have more customers and more on your plate than you think you can manage. Your customer will almost always want more than you and your company can or will deliver. Sometimes these demands will be unreasonable. Customers will almost always notice imperfections, call about service deficiencies, make demands, and inform you that your competitor is offering a huge price discount at the worst possible time.

This is reality. It is the reality that the vast majority of books and training programs on customer service and relationships brush over or ignore. It is why so many training programs fail to actually improve the customer experience. Salespeople, account managers and customer service professionals are left wondering if the trainer or author has ever actually managed a customer relationship. Most of these programs treat customer relationships as if they exist in the vacuum of a perfect world rather than being woven into the fabric of an imperfect and flawed business environment.

There is nothing easy about serving customers. Your job is hard, demanding and at times maddening because ...