University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Service Magic
Book

Service Magic

The Art of Amazing Your Customers

Ron Zemke and Chip R. Bell
Kaplan Publishing, 2003
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Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

Despite the rather strained analogy and the authors’ laborious attempts to make it amusing for 248 pages, this book does offer some genuine magical flashes of customer service insight. You will learn a great deal that is worth knowing. Many of these insights are the kind of pointers on customer service that bear repeating, rereading and remembering. The magic metaphor is a worthy attempt to make them fresh again, and to examine the elements of place, performance and process, step by step. getAbstract.com recommends this book for new magicians, and even for magicians with experience who need to renew their customer service razzle-dazzle. Now, show ’em how you pull that rabbit out of your hat!

Summary

Service Magic

The curtains part and there, ladies and gentleman, in top hat and tails, flanked by lovely assistants, standing in the middle of an eye-candy set, is the great magician. The cards fly from hand to hand; they seem to come out of the air. The snowy pigeons and bunny rabbits appear and disappear. The comely assistant floats dreamily in midair, unsupported by any wires or pillars - as the hoop passed around her body clearly proves.

Awe ripples through the audience. Unable to take their eyes off the stage, dazzled, puzzled, delighted, they are in a very real sense enchanted. No matter how materialistic they may be, no matter how convinced they are that everything on the stage is just smoke and mirrors and trickery, they can’t help feeling enchanted.

That’s magic. Service magic.

You know that stage magic isn’t really an extrasensory, supernatural phenomenon. You know that it depends on learning sleight of hand and practicing, practicing, practicing. So does service magic. What distinguishes a hash-slinger from the headwaiter at the best restaurant in Paris? Service magic. This kind of spark comes from a genuine, internal motivation to create a perfect...

About the Authors

Ron Zemke and Chip Bell have written 43 books and hundreds of articles. President and vice-president, respectively, of Performance Research Associates, Inc., they’re the authors of the Knock Your Socks Off Service series.

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