Excellent service is foundational to the success of a call center and while books may not be your primary resource for training agents, there is huge demand for customer service books in 2025.
Agents, managers, supervisors, and other contact center employees know the importance of consistent, high-quality CX. Through research and learning, you can give yourself that extra edge when it comes to delivering exceptional support and building long-lasting relationships.
In this article, we’ll discuss why it’s so important to go the extra mile, and recommend 11 essential customer service books that could end up making a real difference to your organization.
Agents have more contact with customers than anyone else in the company, and they’re almost always the first to hear about any issues or complaints.
88% of customers think service is more important than ever—and bad service is extremely costly. At the same time, 64% admit they would switch to a different business if they didn’t receive good support, regardless of how much they liked the product.
Given the nature of the agent-customer relationship, your support can make or break your business—80% of consumers now say CX is just as important as your products and services.
There are countless books aimed at improving service, but we’ve narrowed it down to a list of our absolute favorites. They offer a mix of helpful advice, practical tips, and been-there, done-that insights that can’t be found elsewhere.
Here are our picks for the 11 best customer service books in 2025.
A follow-up to the original Chief Customer Officer (2006), Jeanne Bliss returns with an updated look at how to transform CX for both B2C and B2B companies. The book details Bliss’s ‘Five-Competency Model’, an approach she uses to coach:
C-Suite
CCOs
VPs of Customer Experience
Including more than 40 case studies of CCOs embedding these five competencies within their organizations, Chief Customer Officer 2.0 gives readers a proven framework for building a customer-driven growth engine.
Under Tony Hsieh's guidance, Zappos went from merchandise sales of $1.6 million in 2000 to over $1 billion in 2008. How did Zappos see such staggering growth in just eight years? The answer is a relentless focus on company culture and customer service.
Delivering Happiness tells the story of this remarkable growth journey and how Hsieh’s vision of support as a company-wide responsibility (not a departmental one) revolutionized Zappos.
Perhaps the most enlightening aspect of this story is the idea that focusing on the happiness of those around you can go a long way toward improving your own performance and happiness.
The first book on our list by author Shep Hyken (with a mouthful of a title, admittedly) explores how businesses can transform satisfied customers into passionate “customer evangelists” through excellent CX. It outlines the five distinct phases that customers go through:
Uncertainty
Alignment
Experience
Ownership
Amazement
Hyken outlines strategies to move customers from satisfied to amazed by consistently exceeding customer expectations. In his eyes, a company culture that prioritizes service and encourages agents to deliver unforgettable experiences every time is critical for success.
Jill Griffin's classic is a practical guide filled with actionable tips and real-world advice on cultivating loyalty among your customers. Using concrete examples, Griffin explores:
The significance of customer loyalty
How you can earn it
What you can do to ensure long-term loyalty
The crux of Griffin’s argument is that customer satisfaction is the key to customer loyalty.
If you can keep your customers consistently happy, you can keep them loyal. Each chapter examines customer loyalty from a different angle, providing the reader with steps to follow, tools to use, and a summary of key points to refer back to.
Disney is one of the most recognizable, beloved brands in history. Behind the magic created on screen, customer service has played a huge role in establishing the Disney brand. In Be Our Guest, Theodore Kinni explores its role in building the Disney empire over the decades.
Essentially, Kinni suggests that simply satisfying customers isn’t enough—you have to exceed expectations to truly leave a mark and establish a long-lasting relationship. Kinni looks at the practices and procedures that enable Disney to continuously exceed expectations and deliver exceptional service.
The Effortless Experience is a bold entry into the canon that challenges commonly-held beliefs about customer loyalty and the best ways to cultivate it.
While it’s long been argued that customer loyalty is driven by delivering exceptional, above-and-beyond service, the authors of this book contend that conventional wisdom on the matter is misguided (sorry, Be Our Guest).
Dixon, Toman, and DeLisi instead argue that it all boils down to the basics. If you can just solve your customer’s problems, they will be happy. The Effortless Experience provides tools and templates to put this advice into action for:
Better service
Lower costs
Increased loyalty
After the success of The Cult of the Customer, Shep Hyken returns with seven strategies to establish loyalty not only among customers but also among employees. Hyken, like many, believes that customer service can be an important differentiator in a competitive market.
You can embed a customer-focused philosophy throughout your organization by including everyone in the process—not just the CS department.
With 100+ examples from 50 role-model companies supporting the 7 key strategies, The Amazement Revolution is useful for any business with a support component, regardless of size or sector.
Complaints are an unavoidable reality for any business. Whether you’re running a lemonade stand or a Fortune 500 company, you’re going to face an unhappy customer at some point.
While complaints have always been part and parcel of running a business, the advent of smartphones and social media has created an environment where customers can vent their frustrations on countless channels at any time.
With this in mind, Jay Baer has put together a collection of data-driven strategies to help you handle complaints by meeting them head-on. Hug Your Haters shows that when customers give you lemons, you can make lemonade. 🍋
In this book, serial entrepreneur and internet personality Gary ‘Vee’ dives into how the power of authentic relationships can transform businesses and their approach to customer experience.
He argues that businesses can no longer rely on traditional marketing tactics. Instead, they need to genuinely engage with their customer base and treat them like individuals, not transactions.
Vaynerchuk highlights how social media can humanize brands, creating fresh opportunities for outreach and connection. This book shows how companies can build loyal communities that drive long-term growth and success by building trust and showing customer appreciation.
This book explores the philosophy that helped make Nordstrom into a retail giant, distilling their beliefs into actionable strategies that can be applied to any industry. It highlights how Nordstrom focuses on delivering exceptional CX by:
Empowering employees
Creating a customer-centric culture
Encouraging innovation within the workplace
Highlighting values like trust-building, employee autonomy, and continuous improvements, this book gives you a glimpse at what your customers want out of brands—and how your business can deliver.
What Customers Crave explores how businesses can design customer experiences that are both relevant and memorable by understanding what customers truly desire. Webb emphasizes the importance of identifying two critical factors: what customers love and what they hate.
By mapping out every touchpoint and creating positive interactions at each stage, businesses can champion customer loyalty and stand out in a competitive market.
The book also provides actionable strategies that any business can use to create customized experiences and tailor products or services to meet customers' emotional—or practical—needs. Deploying these strategies effectively will help drive customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.
With so many great options, how do you pick one (or more than one if you’re in the mood)?
Whether you’re in a leadership role, or an agent on the front line, you need to keep your customer service skills sharp to drive growth and bump up the bottom line. Even a 5% improvement in customer retention can lead to a 25% increase in profits.
The best way to guarantee excellent support is to make sure you’re consistently delivering a great experience. Purpose-built QA software like Scorebuddy can help you monitor and improve service quality by:
Pinpointing areas for improvement
Evaluating more interactions (up to 100% with AI!)
Speeding up your QA workflows
If you want to see Scorebuddy in action, reach out today and request a demo.
