This was a delightful read with excellent, engaging stories to illustrate the absolutely superior customer service that we all miss in our day-to-day lives – unless we shop at Nordstrom. This book is laid out with “Keys to Success” at the end of each chapter as well as one or more “Exercises” for you to implement in your own company. The Keys to Success pull out the salient lessons from the stories and puts them in succinct bullet points that reinforce what we have just read. The exercises give us guidance on how to execute on the ideas we get from the stories. The rest, that is actually putting the lessons into practice, is up to us of course.
The authors continually point out how front line salespeople create lifetime customers. They also emphasize how management at Nordstrom gets out of the way of their sales people and let them do the work. The managers truly believe in customer service, demonstrate excellent customer service and also demonstrate that they have faith in sales people being able to do the job without a bunch of rules and regulations. In short, the sales team at Nordstrom is truly empowered to provide excellent customer service.
But Nordstrom is also a competitive place to work. And the training is very much “on the job training.” No one tells you what to do, yet everyone is willing to help you if you demonstrate that you are willing to have a mentor. This book should be required reading for any person who serves other people – whether in a sales capacity or a service capacity. Besides being chock full of good information concerning customer service, it is a fun read with stories that are sure to “stick in your mind.”
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