The Gold Standard: Giving Your Customers What They Didn't Know They Wanted

Learn how to cultivate the most incredible customer experiences on earth through this essential guide by Colin Cowie, distinguished purveyor of unforgettable “wow” events for the world’s most demanding clients.

If you’re searching for ways to ensure your customers walk away from your company with a smile on their face and a plan to return, you found it. And any business organization can adapt the tools and techniques in this book.

Colin Cowie, one of the world’s most sought-after event planners, shares the hard-won and hard-nosed advice he has learned through entertaining and engaging stories and examples. He gives you the indisputable blueprint for creating a customer-service culture that you can tailor to your own needs, whether you’re a shopkeeper, corporate marketing director, or budding event planner.

Upon coming to the United States from South Africa with $400 in his pocket, Colin built his highly successful catering and event-planning business from the ground up to become event planner to the most respected tastemakers and personalities in the world—including Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Seacrest, and Kim Kardashian, to name a few.

In this book, you will:

• Learn how to formulate your own vision, mission statements, and guiding principles, and effectively communicate them to your team.
• Learn how you can align your vision with your essential mission statement.
• Discover the core values, including service and accountability, that fuel Colin’s customer-care ethos, and how you can apply those values to your own business.
• Have a renewed understanding of how vitally important it is that you take good care of the people who work for you so they, in turn, can care for your customers.
• Become armed to inspire and empower your team.
• Be guided to create your own “bible” of scripts, protocols, and procedures that will streamline customer-care situations while making every customer feel like their individual desires are being taken care of.
• Learn how to use every complaint as an opportunity, as well as why you should be more afraid of a client who doesn’t complain when something goes wrong versus one who does.

About the Author

Colin Cowie has led an extraordinary life. He arrived in the United States from South Africa in 1985; his smarts, personality, and stylish sensibility have led him into the fast-paced, glamorous world of planning over-the-top parties for royalty, celebrities, and business luminaries. Respected around the world as an arbiter of style, Colin Cowie has been at the forefront of event and wedding planning for the past 25 years, creating trends and raising the bar for providing the ultimate guest experience.

Colin has created some of the most talked-about events in the world, including the multi-million-dollar opening of Palm Island Dubai, the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, and Atlantis on Nassau Island, as well as Oprah Winfrey’s Legends Bali. In addition to Oprah, his celebrity clients include Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Seacrest, Jimmy Iovine, Kim Kardashian, Lil Wayne, Nicole Kidman, and Demi Moore, to name a few. Colin’s corporate clients include Audemars Piguet, Dom Perignon, Davidoff of Geneva, Warner Bros., CBS, Cash Money Records, The Whitney Museum, Architectural Digest, Kerzner International’s One and Only Hotels, and Cosmopolitan and Style.