Chip Bell

In tough economic times, keeping customers loyal is vital to growth and profits. Chip Bell helps organizations create innovative service breakthroughs that cement relationships.

Chip Bell has helped Fortune 100 companies dramatically enhance their bottom lines and marketplace reputation through innovative customer-centric strategies that address the needs of today’s picky, fickle, vocal and “all about me” customers. Bell reveals the best practices from the organizations leading the customer loyalty charge, giving audiences powerful cutting-edge ideas and strategies they can put into practice the minute they leave his session.

Bell’s impact on audiences is nothing short of extraordinary: over 80% of the groups who hear him bring him back one or more times. Always customer-centered, Bell customizes all his presentations to meet unique organizational needs through a background study, pre-event conference call and phone interviews to better understand specific audience needs and challenges. He is considered a world renowned authority on customer loyalty, writing regularly for many business journals, magazines and blogs.

Chip is a frequent guest on national TV and radio and has authored several bestselling books including: Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service; Customers As Partners; Magnetic Service; Customer Loyalty Guaranteed and Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers. His books have been endorsed by the presidents of such service greats as Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton Hotels, Build-A-Bear Workshops, JetBlue, Marriott, Chick-fil-A and Southwest Airlines. His newest book, Wired and Dangerous: How Your Customers Have Changed and What To Do About It, hit bookstores in the spring of 2011.

Innovative Service: Strategies for Creating Growth and Bottom Line Impact  

What do Netflix, Build-A-Bear, Zappos, Cabela’s, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and Progressive Insurance have in common, other than incredible business growth? They all have created or reinvented the way they manage the customer experience in their industries. Remarkable service not only requires market and organizational leadership but more importantly a perpetual pursuit of innovative ways to make the customers’ experience sparkly, but consistent; enriching, but profitable. Value-added has gotten way too expensive; smart organizations focus on value-unique. 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 his best-selling book, Take Their Breath Away, this lively, provocative session draws on Dr. Chip Bell’s 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 customer experience 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 strategies and ingenuity to their culture.

Wired and Dangerous: How Your Customers Have Changed and What to Do About It

Your customers have been forever changed by a perfect storm—the convergence of anxiety created by a resilient and tough recession, frustration fostered by too much high tech service without high touch, and the power of being able to voice displeasure instantly to thousands via social media.  Organizations that recognize the emerging “customer revolution” and adjust to this new normal customer will thrive; those that continue to use the “tired and true” methods of the past will fail.  Today’s customers are picky (demanding value), fickle (quicker to leave), vocal (assertively telling all) and vain (expecting personalized service).  Customer expectations are 33% higher this year over last year.  And, since word of mouse (social media) today has five times the impact of word of mouth, it takes rethinking strategies and tactics to select ones that change today’s “customer as king” into tomorrow’s “customer as partner.”  It requires insuring frontline employees have the authority and capacity to effectively serve in a multi-channel environment.  It involves reinventing experiences that create customer ease and delight resulting in loyalty or “stickiness.”  Based on his best-selling book by the same title, this powerful, high-energy keynote draws on Dr. Bell’s deep experience consulting with many of the elite service-providing companies plus his cutting edge customer research. Attendees learn proven techniques and tactics needed to drive business growth and reputation.

Customers as Partners:  Building Profitable Professional Relationships That Last

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.