BOOK FACTS
- Title: “Positively Outrageous Service: How To Delight And Astound Your Customers And Win Them For Life 2 nd Edition”
- Author: T. Scott Gross
- Publisher: The Thin Book Publishing Company
- Copyright: 2004
- No. of Pages: 204
- No. of Chapters: 15
RATING (5 IS A MUST READ – 1 IS LOW INTEREST IN READING)
Readability: 5
Maintains Attention: 4
Applicability of Information: 4
REVIEW
“Positively Outrageous Service” by T. Scott Gross is a very enjoyable book to read. I found his ideas and thoughts regarding how to provide the best customer service were creative, energetic, and practical.
“Positively Outrageous Service” is a book for those people who are truly interested in providing the best service for their customers. Gross’s ideas will challenge and stretch your imagination. The reader should be prepared and willing to think outside of the box. Gross provides day-to-day practical strategies and concepts for increasing your customer satisfaction. He also addresses how to work with your employees to bring them on board with making customer satisfaction a priority.
“Positively Outrageous Service” appears at first to be a very simple book with easy strategies to implement. As you continue to read through you realize that the concepts and principles that Gross espouses are simple in many ways, yet take a tremendous commitment and a lot of courage to implement.
Gross utilizes numerous real-life stories to communicate his message. Through these stories, you understand how to implement his strategies and concepts. Most importantly, you realize how impactful and beneficial the concepts of “Positively Outrageous Service” can be to your organization and customers.
SUMMARY OF MAIN POINTS
“Positively Outrageous Service” is broken into four parts:
- “An Affair of the Heart”
- “A Positively Outrageous Solution”
- “The First Step to POS: Microbranding”
- “The Manager’s Toolbox”
An Affair of the Heart discusses the significance of investing your heart into caring for your customers. Gross says that Positively Outrageous Service “is the story of how great servers love their customers unconditionally and put big money on the bottom line.” The main point of this part is that Positively Outrageous Service “is as much about who you are as it is what you do.”
A Positively Outrageous Solution defines what Positively Outrageous Service is. It shares the essence of this customer service concept through a variety of real-life stories. Gross explains Positively Outrageous Service as “the story you can’t wait to tell. Everyone has a tale about a favorite restaurant, airline, or retail shop. Some of us have stories about manufacturers and distributors. But all of us have stories that are so good we can’t wait for our turn. In these stories lie the secrets of retailing success, and in these pages, those simple secrets will be told.”
The First Step to POS: Microbranding is the third section where Gross discusses how to have your organization stand out amongst everyone else. Gross states it this way, “You can spend millions on advertising if you wish, but there are much better and infinitely cheaper ways to stand out in a crowded market. And we aren’t just referring to techniques for marketing your business. What works well in the worlds of retailing, health care, manufacturing, even government agencies works even better when applied to your workgroup, your career, even your personal relationships!”
The Manager’s Toolbox provides a variety of practical tools to use on a daily basis. Gross provides the reader with:
- Positively Outrageous Service Predictor
- Positively Outrageous Service management Quiz
- Ten Commandments for managers
- Top Causes for Employee Morale
- Team Management Diagnostic
CALL TO ACTION
After reading this book, the following five points are needed to develop your Positively Outrageous Service attitudes and skills:
- Consider this point – “You cannot easily separate a product from the service experience. And, the service experience will have an ever-greater role in the purchase decision, especially when the products under consideration are similar.”
- “The most involved workers are the most invested workers. Find a way to make every worker feel self-employed.”
- “Work is like a treasure hunt: fun when you know the way; pure agony when you are hopelessly unprepared. People love jobs they are good at!”
- “The happiest workers are those who have some freedom when it comes to deciding how and when the work will be done.”
- “A Microbrand is a precisely targeted, highly focused personal or local brand built through the strategic use of PR and calculated networking.”
