The nine best books and podcasts for customer service inspiration

As a business, you should naturally want to provide the highest level of customer service possible. Many businesses understand the importance of this fact, and invest time and money into resources that can help them do so.

There’s a catch, though; not all of these resources are created equal, and even those that are pretty good have a tendency to just repeat what everyone else is saying. So how do you find the right resources right away and get the most out of your time?

In this post, we’re going to take a look at the nine best books and podcasts for customer service inspiration and what makes them great. These are all reliable sources of actionable information that are sure to help your business.

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

Zappos is known for its astoundingly good customer service, and this book was written by its CEO, Tony Hsieh. The book discusses creating a company culture that enables better customer service, knowing that taking care of your employees will help them to take care of your customers in turn. Every employee is considered a customer service employee, no matter what their role, and this book shows you how you can use these strategies to ensure customer service excellence day in and day out.

2. The Customer Loyalty Space

This podcast focuses on specific ways that you can go above and beyond in order to take customers from satisfied purchasers to loyal clients. There is frequent discussion about loyalty programs designed to improve the customer experience, and how you can implement them to the greatest effect.

3. Support Ops

Support Ops is a weekly podcast that discusses specific customer service challenges that could arise in your business and how to tackle them.

This podcast covers everything from what to do when you get new management, how to improve team communication, and what terminology and internal language will help you set the stage for success. It’s an invaluable resource that all businesses should be listening to, and with more than 150 episodes, it’s almost guaranteed to have solutions to any problem that you could be struggling with.

4. Uncommon Service: How to Win By Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

Written by authors Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, this book dives into four different truths of how to provide great customer service. They go beyond the theoretical and look at numerous different case studies, showing you how specific businesses have scaled their customer service as they’ve scaled their businesses and how you can do it, too.

This book reminds readers that while no business is perfect, you can still have excellent customer service that will allow you to grow by putting your clients first.

5. Amazing Business Radio

Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, and he hosts Amazing Business Radio. Here, he interviews business and customer service professionals that range from CEOs to viral video stars from all over the world.

This podcast shares actionable information and insights on everything from the tools that can help improve your customer support team to how you can scale without sacrificing your customer’s experience.

6. Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty is Priceless

There’s a lot of competition out there, no matter what industry your business is in. Because of this, author Jeffrey Gitomer argues that customer satisfaction isn’t enough; you need to be providing service so outstanding that it helps to build loyalty.

Not sure how you’re measuring up? Gitomer even has a self-evaluation test that will help you to assess where your business stands and give you an idea of where to take your next steps.

7. Focus on Customer Service

This podcast does exactly what it sounds like, and in each episode they talk to representatives from brands who are rocking their customer service. As a result, individual podcast episodes can come across like case studies, looking at brands like Zappos, Dell, and even Ebay.

8. What Customers Crave: How to Create Relevant and Memorable Experiences at Every Touchpoint

Nicholas Webb’s book reminds businesses that it’s not enough to deliver service at a “meets expectations” level; you want to go above and beyond.

The book discusses how to create truly memorable experiences for customers, building a relationship that leads to long-term loyalty. This will help you outshine your competitors, especially if you’re able to deliver these moments with that deeply human personal touch they crave.

9. Support Driven

Support Driven is a podcast that’s all about how to better train and strengthen your support team to ensure success.

It regularly features interviews with prominent members from the customer service industry, and they go over things like outsourcing your customer support, how to avoid overworking your staff, and key metrics in the industry you need to watch. Each episode is full of information that you can start using right away.

Conclusion

No matter where you are in your customer service development, there’s always room for improvement, and new changes in technology are happening so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. These resources can help.

All nine books and podcasts on this list are exceptional resources that will help you take your customer service to the next level—even if it’s already great. The continuation of education, after all, will ensure that both your customer support team and your customers themselves are getting everything they need to have a fantastic experience every time.

Jamie is the Channel Relations Manager for PATLive. PATLive is a 24/7 live answering service that answers calls for thousands of businesses nationwide using its proprietary software and top-notch agents.