Chip Bell

Recall the absolutely best customer service experience of your entire life. What were the features of this profoundly remarkable memory? Today’s customers do not talk (remark) or tweet about good service; only experiences they find unique, special, and ingenious. Research shows value-added (taking what customers expect and adding more) will not provide a solid ROI. But, value-unique (delivering an unexpected, compelling surprise) creates animated advocates and fuels bottom line impact. Based on Bell’s newest best-selling book, Kaleidoscope, this high-energy session provides the tools, tips and techniques for leading and delivering innovative service that sparkles.

Service innovation paves the way for a “take their breath away” experience that can overcome customer resistance to price during challenging economic times. It requires a contemporary understanding of “responsible freedom” (empowerment) plus leadership practices drawn from the R&D/inventive world. Based on Bell’s best-selling book, Take Their Breath Away, this lively, provocative session draws on his more than 20 years working with top leaders from the world’s leading brands to help them stay ahead of the competition by maintaining best-in-breed service innovation strategies. Attendees leave with countless cutting-edge techniques and a head full of ideas for either reinventing or reigniting the service experience they deliver to those they serve. Frontline employees gain competence and courage to start innovating; leaders gain insights and wisdom in ways to add creativity to their approaches and ingenuity to their culture.

Distinctive service in the professional or B2B world can be vastly different than the approach used by a merchant to win a consumer. For the business-to-business world and/or the space of sophisticated products or specialized expertise, the path to success has become a long-term, profitable relationship, not just a glitzy experience. When those you serve feel like valued partners in a power-free relationship, their expectations are more realistic, they are more forgiving of mistakes, more ardent advocates, and their economic investment in the firm or organization deepens. Research convincingly demonstrates it is the depth of the relationship, not the quality of the product or expertise, which retains the relationship. Even in the B2B world with its extreme price-sensitivity and the watchful eye of purchasing czars, the quality of the relationship has become a key component in how value is defined. Based on his international best-selling book Customers as Partners, Dr. Chip Bell’s insightful, fresh program provides audiences with provocative, yet practical tools, tips and techniques for building profitable relationships that last.

Operations and organizations that put customers in the center of planning and execution attract the best employees and retain the best customers. Chip Bell has worked with many of the most customer-centric operations in the world including The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, USAA, AMEX, Cadillac, Marriott, True Value, Southwest Airlines, Harley-Davidson.  He shares the secrets of what makes these customer-centric organizations so successful.  Based on Chip’s best-selling book, Wired and Dangerous:  How Your Customers Have Changed and What to Do About It, this keynote was delivered to over 1000 store managers and company leaders.