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Do you work in customer service? Do you own a customer-facing business? How can you improve your communication skills?
Exceptional customer service is the key to a business’s success. If you want customers to buy your products, they need to feel supported at every step of the sales process.
Build long-term relationships with consumers with these customer service books.
Books to Improve Customer Interaction Skills
The most important aspect of customer service is talking to consumers. If your communication skills aren’t up to par, then you won’t have much luck convincing people to buy your product. To ensure you’re ready for any conversation that comes your way, read these essential communication books.
People who are comfortable in social situations have the best chance of establishing beneficial relationships and creating opportunities for personal and professional success. Unfortunately, many people struggle with social situations and don’t know how to confidently approach and talk to others. Their discomfort prevents them from creating new connections and they miss out on enjoying opportunities that spring from social and professional relationships.
In How to Talk to Anyone, Leil Lowndes presents practical techniques to help you overcome social discomfort and confidently develop new connections. Her book walks you through her techniques for mastering the art of conversing with anyone. You’ll come away knowing how to:
- Appear more likable without saying a word
- Confidently approach people you want to talk to
- Feel at home in any social context
- Encourage meaningful conversations
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It, by Chris Voss (with co-writing assistance from Tahl Raz) aims to provide a comprehensive guide to negotiating theory and strategy, giving you the tools you need to negotiate successfully.
Voss’s thesis is that good negotiation happens on the emotional level of the brain, not the rational level. Your job as a negotiator, Voss argues, is to practice and display empathy toward your counterpart by understanding their emotions, learning to see the situation from their point of view—and, ultimately, getting them to feel comfortable enough with you to let their emotional guard down.
Have you ever wondered how persuasion works? How are salespeople, fundraisers, and politicians able to lure us into compliance—without even thinking that we’re being manipulated?
This is what Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion sets out to answer. The book shows how the persuaders of the world use our basic mental instincts against us, transforming them into tools of compliance. By exploring the origins and common uses of six principles of persuasion—reciprocity, commitment/consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity—you’ll learn to spot when you’re being hustled and discover how to beat the persuaders at their own game.
Have you ever tried to communicate a point you think is important, only to find that the other person isn’t getting it? Joel Schwartzberg says it’s a common experience that comes from not actually knowing the point you’re trying to make.
In Get to the Point!, Schwartzberg argues that anyone can make a point that leads to action or change—you just have to know what your point is and how to convey it effectively. Whether you’re trying to convince a friend to watch your favorite show or pitching your boss on a new idea, you must first have a point, then know how to market it to compel others to action.
In this book, Schwartzberg gives you tools to help you identify, craft, and communicate your point so it resonates with your audience and we’ll explain how to apply your point in a range of settings and scenarios.
Sales skills are critical to everyone on the planet. This is because “selling” has a much broader definition than describing the work of someone who works in retail—in fact, selling refers to convincing, influencing, negotiating, and communicating with others, in any arena, to get your way. You have close relationships because you sold other people on spending time with you. You have your health because you sold yourself on diet and exercise. You have a job and money because you sold your boss on your ability.
In Sell or Be Sold, sales expert Grant Cardone shares his 25 years’ worth of experience working as a salesman and his life’s worth of experience selling in a personal context.
Do you avoid small talk because you find it intimidating or lacking in value? If so, The Fine Art of Small Talk is your ticket to conversational success. According to Debra Fine, small talk is a skill well worth developing because our careers, romantic prospects, and social lives depend on connecting with other people. Indeed, it’s difficult to succeed socially without small talk because it establishes the emotional tone of our interactions and helps us gauge how deeply we’d like to connect with each other.
In this book, Fine walks you through small talk tips and her ideal conversational process step by step—from the first introduction to exiting the conversation—teaching you everything you need to appear confident and engaging in any context. Learn how to break the ice with strangers, keep a conversation going, and avoid the most common conversational pitfalls—in a way anyone can follow.
Most people communicate from their own perspective, but great communication comes from understanding and connecting with other people. Written by communication expert Jay Sullivan, Simply Said is a blueprint for effective business communication. Top-notch communication skills are essential to success in any professional field—after all, you can only get clients, colleagues, and audiences to buy into your ideas if you’re able to communicate them clearly.
Sullivan argues that you can deliver a clear and compelling message by focusing on what others hope to get from the exchange and communicating in a way that serves them.
In this book, Sullivan advises how to:
- Create and deliver memorable presentations
- Write documents and emails that people will actually read
- Navigate communication in specific business scenarios
How to Win Friends and Influence People
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is a classic that needs little introduction. It’s one of the best-selling books of all time and a major developer of the “self-help” book genre. Many principles written in How to Win Friends and Influence People have been repackaged and articulated in different forms.
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