Kegan

Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service Reflection

                Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service presents the reader with 200 pages of common sense material. Although the vast majority of this book is obvious, there were a few small aspects that were unique and could easily be applied to any customer service position to make the customer happier. This book was divided into five key parts. Part one dealt with fundamental principles (primarily qualities that you must be to help achieve customer satisfaction), whereas part two discussed more qualities and tactics including honesty, creating trust, and listening (as opposed to simply hearing). Part three discussed communication, which was the most informative aspect of this book. Part four and five of the book discussed problem solving, and “taking care of you”.

The first part of this book was entirely common sense knowledge. This portion discussed “fundamentals”. The most important aspect for me was the idea that you represent the company that you are working for. It is important as an employee to think about your actions in relation to how they will affect the company/institution. If I were to make a poor choice when I was working in the center for academic technology, and a customer saw my actions, the customer would likely think less of Butler as a whole, or think less of the entire information technology department. This crucial aspect of customer service should be a staple of what the employees should think about before helping customers. The remainder of part one discussed important qualities including being reliable, consistent, predictable, empathetic and responsive.

The second part of the book presented a few new aspects from part one, but primarily reemphasized/ repeated key portions. The biggest takeaway that I had from this portion of the book is to just be honest. When I am a customer in any business, I would much rather hear bad news concisely than to hear a representative rambling about how they think that they can fix the problem (when they have no idea whatsoever).  I found this point to be the most important idea in the second part of the book. Yet, 20 pages later in the book (on page 74), they present phrases that avoid telling the customer the truth, or tell the customer the truth indirectly. The authors of this book claim that you shouldn’t say “I don’t know”, instead you should say “Gee, that’s a good question. Let me check and find out”. I think that it is absolutely fine to say that you don’t know the answer to a customer’s question as long as you don’t just leave it at that. If you don’t know what to do, you should use your resources to try to find out on your own prior to asking a superior. The book initially suggests honesty, yet later finds a variety of ways to ‘sugarcoat’ the truth to make the customer feel better.

The third portion of the book discussed communication in the workplace. This is relevant to any position, but for my position the email section has the most relevance. The book claims that it is important to be personal in your email responses, to write clearly and concisely, and finally to not write in caps lock. This portion of the book was also common sense, but I found this section to be the most informative section in the reading.

The fourth and fifth sections of the book discussed problem solving and taking care of yourself. These portions helped conclude the reading by reemphasizing the previous points that were repetitively presented.

Overall, I did not like this book. It presented an abundance of relevant yet obvious information that the average employee should already know. With the exception of several key takeaways (that were also relatively obvious), this book could have been written in under 50 pages with the same amount of detail and information.