To provide your customers with 5-Star Customer Service means you must be able to: 1.Make Service Excellence a key part of your Strategy and reflect it through senior man-agement commitment and resource allocation. 2.Enhance the components that promote Service Excellence as a Culture, at individual, departmental and group levels. 3.Reduce or eliminate the components that limit or hinder your chances to practice a Culture of Service Excellence. 4.Have in place policies, systems and processes that enable you to constantly identify and cover the gaps between your prevailing Customer Service quality and your Desired Service Excellence Culture. 5.Use a combination of initiatives and approaches, individually and corporately, in the context of your organisation or work responsibilities, to customize and apply the 5 Pillars of the 5-Star Customer Service Framework, namely: a.Knowledge & Skills required to provide excellent (5-Star) customer service. b.Effective Communication Skills (Intrapersonal and Interpersonal) c.Attitude and The Personal Brand - a Personal Responsibility In Delivering Excellence (PRIDE) d.Policies, Systems, Processes and Standards (PSPS) - Systematising Excellence in Service provision. e.Customer Relationship Management and Team Dynamics. 6.Understand that a 5-Star rating is a Measure and Mark of Excellence and it takes se-rious commitment to attain and sustain. In writing this book and structuring it the way it has been, my objectives included the following: 1.To inspire professionals in all economic sectors, by exposing them to what some of the best in Customer Service and Customer Relationship Management are doing. 2.To provide university and professional students with an experience-based Customer Service & CRM reference resource, 3.To avail organisations with an essential corporate library resource, and 4.To provide a comprehensive reference text for our 5-Star Services training workshops across economic sectors in Africa and beyond. The tools and principles, used in this book, to enhance the knowledge-acquisition process include the following: 1.Learning Stories A generous dosage of real-life stories have been used as Case Studies to help you learn what to do or what not to do, when it comes to provision of 5-Star Customer Service. 2.Learning Questions Each key section and chapter, includes important questions that will help you reflect on and evaluate your own performance. These questions can be a very useful re-source for group exercises and team dis-cussions. They are meant to facilitate the practical implementation of principles covered. Use these questions to turn your personal and organisational service performance into 5-Star status. 3.What the Best In The World Are Doing Throughout the book, you will encounter special sections, titled: "What the Best In The World Are Doing." Learn from how some of the best, companies and organisation in the world, are excelling in providing 5-Star Customer Service. This also includes the story of India's Case study in implementing Citizen Charters to help im-prove service delivery by government in-stitutions. The inspiring stories of Tony Hsieh and Zappos.com and various other examples from "Interbrand Best Global Brands 2014 Report." 4.Statistics from International Surveys The weight, cost, and business implications of the customer service and relationship management principles covered in the book, are well depicted and supported by numerous statistics from surveys conducted by different sources on the international customer service scene.