Great customer relationships make the world go around. Customers give us the opportunity to apply our talents to serve them. Then, they transfer money from their bank accounts to ours so that we have the financial leverage to meet our goals. This simple, everyday economic interdependence is what business success, professional accountability, and personal prosperity are all about. In today's competitive world, a satisfied customer is no longer enough. A satisfied customer is still shopping around until you provide that WOW experience and make that WOW connection that creates customer loyalty. To do so, you must move beyond mere customer service to the new world of Customer Astonishment. To astonish is to strike with awe and wonder. Author Darby Checketts has spent the past 14 years preparing to show you how. You will learn the principles and methods to make these secrets work for you and your team. Discover the Power of WOW, which is necessary to positively astonish those who depend on you. Set your own mark for world-class customer care.

Sure-Fire, Can't-Miss Tips, Techniques, and Ideas for Building Lifelong Customer Loyalty Imagine having the customer-service secrets of the world's most successful businesses right at your fingertips. With this book you can! Authors Donna Greiner and Theodore Kinni spent five years uncovering how Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines, Ritz-Carlton, American Express, and other world-class companies keep their customers for life. The result is 1,001 timely, entertaining, and brilliantly inventive customer-retention ideas. Inside, you'll discover the secrets to: ·Creating products/services tailored to your customers' needs ·Recognizing and rewarding your most profitable trophy customers ·Using three kinds of guarantees to build customer trust ·Turning first-time customers into frequent buyers ·And much more!

Conflict is a central theme of our lives. We see the negative consequences of war and violence all around us. Even in the workplace, disputes and arguments cause problems and stifle productivity. But opposition can also be positive. For instance, our muscles become stronger as they encounter resistance. The bonds of our relationships can become stronger as we strive to overcome our differences. Likewise, says author Darby Checketts, businesses and organizations can become stronger as a result of conflict. Postive Conflict is a book that goes beyond coping with or handling workplace conflict; its premise is that conflict is often an indicator that creative energy is about to be unleashed. There is potentially positive power inside opposition, just as with the fusion of atoms. When opposing ideas are openly explored, a breakthrough in thinking can occur, which can reveal more comprehensive solutions. And the coming together of these once-opposing forces multiplies the potential for success. If our view of conflict transcends a win-lose mentality, we will see that the flipside of opposition is the opportunity for discovery and innovation. And in business today, we need leaders who can reconcile the seeming exclusivity of competing ideas and fuse them for new and better results. For example, it is the combination of self-confidence and humility that maximizes a leader's effectiveness. By reading Postive Conflict, you will: Recognize the creative energy inside conflict to unleash the power of opposites. Discover why the optimist's answer to everything is "yes"—that the issue is not what is right or wrong, but how to synthesize ideas to expand problem-solving options. Help your stakeholders come together in a spirit of partnership to move beyond special interests and personality clashes. Understand that your own conflicting ideas and viewpoints reveal new dimensions of who you are and the range of opportunities that await you.

Conflict is a central theme of our lives. We see the negative consequences of war and violence all around us. Even in the workplace, disputes and arguments cause problems and stifle productivity. But opposition can also be positive. For instance, our muscles become stronger as they encounter resistance. The bonds of our relationships can become stronger as we strive to overcome our differences. Likewise, says author Darby Checketts, businesses and organizations can become stronger as a result of conflict. Postive Conflict is a book that goes beyond coping with or handling workplace conflict; its premise is that conflict is often an indicator that creative energy is about to be unleashed. There is potentially positive power inside opposition, just as with the fusion of atoms. When opposing ideas are openly explored, a breakthrough in thinking can occur, which can reveal more comprehensive solutions. And the coming together of these once-opposing forces multiplies the potential for success. If our view of conflict transcends a win-lose mentality, we will see that the flipside of opposition is the opportunity for discovery and innovation. And in business today, we need leaders who can reconcile the seeming exclusivity of competing ideas and fuse them for new and better results. For example, it is the combination of self-confidence and humility that maximizes a leader's effectiveness. By reading Postive Conflict, you will: Recognize the creative energy inside conflict to unleash the power of opposites. Discover why the optimist's answer to everything is 'yes' - that the issue is not what is right or wrong, but how to synthesize ideas to expand problem-solving options. Help your stakeholders come together in a spirit of partnership to move beyond special interests and personality clashes. Understand that your own conflicting ideas and viewpoints reveal new dimensions of who you are and the range of opportunities that await you. Darby Checketts is the president of Cornerstone Professional Development of Mesa, Arizona, which he founded in 1985. He is known by his clients as a powerful catalyst for innovation, high performance leadership, and service excellence. He is the author of eight other books, including Leverage: How to Create Your Own 'Tipping Points' in Business and in Life. His work has influenced hundreds of organizations and millions of individuals around the world.

Philip Kotler's name is synonymous with marketing. His textbooks have sold more than 3 million copies in 20 languages and are read as the marketing gospel in 58 countries. Now Kotler on Marketing offers his long-awaited, essential guide to marketing for managers, freshly written based on his phenomenally successful worldwide lectures on marketing for the new millennium. Through Kotler's profound insights you will quickly update your skills and knowledge of the new challenges and opportunities posed by hypercompetition, globalization, and the Internet. Here you will discover the latest thinking, concisely captured in eminently readable prose, on such hot new fields as database marketing, relationship marketing, high-tech marketing, global marketing, and marketing on the Internet. Here, too, you will find Kotler's savvy advice, which has so well served such corporate clients as AT&T, General Electric, Ford, IBM, Michelin, Merck, DuPont, and Bank of America. Perhaps most important, Kotler on Marketing can be read as a penetrating book-length discourse on the 14 questions asked most frequently by managers during the 20-year history of Kotler's worldwide lectures. You will gain a new understanding of such age-old conundrums as how to select the right market segments or how to compete against lower-price competitors. You will find a wealth of cutting-edge strategies and tactics that can be applied immediately to such 21st-century challenges as reducing the enormous cost of customer acquisition and keeping current customers loyal. If your marketing strategy isn't working, Kotler's treasury of revelations offers hundreds of ideas for revitalizing it. Spend a few hours today with the world's bestknown marketer and improve your marketing performance tomorrow.

In poetic style, in novel, easy reading format, the author commends to the corporate personnel two reality-based cultures -- the stage culture and the spiritual culture. With these cultures, he deduces that role excellence becomes a joy and corporate well-being a certainty.