Top 5 Customer Service Books You Can’t Afford To Miss

In this customer-centric era, delivering exceptional customer service is crucial for long-term business growth. But no matter how great your customer service is, you can always improve by learning from industry experts.

Finding a great book is one way of doing that. Investing your time and money in reading it gives you access to an invaluable cache of expert knowledge.

Customer Service is a very complex topic. Fortunately there are several books penned by illustrious writers you can take a leaf out of to help provide the best possible customer service experience.

Let’s have a look at the top 5 customer service books you can read to improve your customer experience:

1. Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers
2. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
3. Managing the Customer Experience: Turning customers into advocates
4. Amaze Every Customer Every Time: 52 Tools for Delivering the Most Amazing Customer Service on the Planet
5. Customer Service: New Rules for a Social Media World

1. Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers

“Listen to the customer’s complaints and act fast.” – Richard Branson

Author: Jay Bear

Twitter Followers: 277, 000

Release Date: 1^st March 2016

Hugging your Haters, or in this case your unhappy customers, can be one of the most effective ways to keep your shoppers happy.

This book has been created with the intention of helping you understand modern consumers, the modern approach to serving them, and troubleshooting of any problems and complaints that come your way.

In it, you will find some important tricks to help you to tackle today’s shoppers.

The book will also give you tips on how to negotiate the world of internet trolls and help you discover the benefits of answering every single complaint that you receive.

If you want to enhance your ability to react to haters and approach them in the right way, then Hug Your Haters is the customer service book for you.

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

“Our customer base grows by the happy customers that go out of our doors.” – Lee Denmore

Author: Tony Hsieh

Twitter Followers: 2.85 Million

Release Date: 7^th June 2010

Delivering Happiness is written in a narrative form and tells the story of Hsieh and his life as an entrepreneur. He describes what challenges he faced when he founded Zappos and LinkExchange. The book is divided into 3 parts, each of them describing his adventures in the business world.

The book also covers his selling of LinkExchange to Microsoft and Zappos to Amazon, in his own words.

If you read this book you will understand Hsieh’s take on what he learned, and how his venture kept its promises. He talks about how important it is to keep everyone around you happy, including clients, and how that has the power itself to make a positive change to your own emotions.

3. Managing the Customer Experience: Turning customers into advocates

“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” – John Russell

Authors: Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler

Release Date: In the year 2002

Managing the customer experience is all about how your faithful shoppers can be advocates for your brand. In this book, Smith and Wheeler detail particular companies that have managed to turn their consumer base into their brand advocates, harnessing the power of customers recommending their company to friends and family.

Smith believes the reason they do this is that these firms have established a branded customer experience, creating a strong bond with their customers, to the point that they just can’t think of doing business with any other brands.

Intrigued? Wondering how you could do the same with your enterprise? Luckily, Smith and Wheeler answer that million-dollar question too in this top-selling book. The authors hit the nail on the head in teaching you how to think from a consumer’s point of view and generate incredible loyalty.

4. Amaze Every Customer Every Time: 52 Tools for Delivering the Most Amazing Customer Service on the Planet

“Whenever you see the opportunity to create a WOW! Moment, Act on it.” – Shep Hyken

Author: Shep Hyken

Twitter Followers: 8, 46, 000

Release Date: 1^st September 2013

Hyken is a very famous customer experience expert and in his book he talks about how providing excellent service can turn a good firm into a great firm. He lays out why Ace Hardware became one of the best customer-oriented companies in America and how they achieved this feat.

According to Hyken, there are 5 tactical departments where organizations have to focus if they want to ‘Amaze’ their consumers: culture, leadership, competitive edge, community, and one-on-one. Amaze everyone details 52 Tools, or ways, by which you can lure your customers and give them a great experience.

If you want to transform your entity for better consumer service, reading this book will open your eyes to the possibilities.

5. Customer Service: New Rules for a Social Media World

“Social Media will help you to build loyalty of your current customers to the point that they will willingly, and for free, tell others about you.” – Bonnie Sains

Author: Peter Shankman

Followers of Twitter: 164, 000

Release Date: December 2010

Social media has become ubiquitous to the point that it has real power to affect the fortunes of your company. The positive is that you can leverage Social Media as a tool to increase the visibility and popularity of your company.

Shankman, himself an online marketer, shows how you can master the art of social media, using it to your advantage with absolutely zero investment. The author also talks about his work at HARO, and provides details around consulting he has done with several Fortune 500 companies.

The book will tell you how to use social media right, with all the do’s and don’ts that entails, and gives you details about how to build consumer trust, loyalty, and credibility online, as well as whilst teaching you ways to avoid online complaints that can kill your reputation.

Online and social media customer service is vital, and Shankman will tell you how to make the most of it in a step by step analysis.

Customer service books to expand your knowledge

There we have it. Those are some of the best customer service books to help your business enhance your customer experience and streamline your customer support operations and services.

Have you read any of these customer service books? If so, which one's your favorite? Are we missing any that should be on this list?

Let us know in the comments.

Laduram Vishnoi

CEO, Acquire.io

Laduram Vishnoi is Acquire’s President & Co-founder. He enjoys building companies and scaling product teams. He’s passionate about AI, machine learning, neuroscience, and meditation.