Magnetic Service: Secrets of Creating Passionately Devoted Customers

Partnerships are fast becoming the primary structure of contemporary business, as organizations partner with vendors, unions, customers, and even competitors to take advantage of short-term market opportunities, leverage intellectual capital, and create more flexible and innovative enterprises. Even more important are our everyday partnerships—with the person in the cubicle down the aisle, the department down the hall, or the supplier across town.

In this important guide, authors Chip Bell and Heather Shea tell you how to create and maintain truly great partnerships. Using examples drawn from the world of business and the world of dance to illustrate the principles and practices of great partnering, they lead you step-by-step from deciding if partnership is right for you to celebrating the end of a successful partnership.

Dance Lessons is the first book to fully explore the interpersonal side of partnerships, which is more often than not what causes partnerships to falter or fail—or to flourish and excel. It is a wise yet practical guide to the inner workings of great partnerships, revealing exactly how the champions choreograph their partnership dances for consistently great performances.

Chip R. Bell is a senior partner with The Chip Bell Group and manages their headquarters office near Dallas, Texas. His consulting practice focuses on helping organizations to build a culture that supports long- term customer devotion. Prior to starting a consulting firm in the late 1970s, he was director of management and organization development for NCNB, now Bank of America.
Chip is the author or co-author of fifteen books, including Service Magic: How to Amaze Your Customers (with Ron Zemke); Customer Love: Attracting and Keeping Customers for Life; Customers As Partners: Building Relationships That Last; Managers As Mentors: Building Partnerships For Learning; Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service (with Ron Zemke); Dance Lessons: Six Steps to Great Partnerships in Business and Life (with Heather Shea); and Beep-Beep!: Competing in the Age of the Road Runner (with Oren Harari). His work has been featured on CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg TV, NPR, Voice of America, and Reuters and in the Wall Street Journal; Fortune; USA Today; Entre- preneur Magazine; Inc. Magazine; Business Week; and Bottom Line Business.
Chip has served as a consultant, keynote speaker, or trainer to such major organizations as IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, Royal Bank, Marriott, Pfizer, Sears, Merrill Lynch, Ritz-Carlton, 3M, USAA, Aurora Health, Lockheed-Martin, Harley-Davidson, Honda, MBNA, Bank of
167America, Universal Studios, Pepsi, AAA, Duke Energy, and Victoria’s Secret. He was a highly decorated infantry unit commander with the elite 82nd Airborne in Vietnam. Chip is married to Nancy Rainey Bell, a school administrator and attorney.
Bilijack R. Bell is a commercial real estate professional with Wilson, Hull & Neal in Atlanta. With eight years in commercial real estate, he has a solid reputation for highly creative approaches to client service. That reputation has earned him membership in both the prestigious President’s Club as well as the Million Dollar Club. His service articles have appeared in such publications as Realtor Magazine, Staff Digest, Executive Excellence, and Midas Matters.
Bilijack is a graduate of Elon College in Burlington, North Carolina, where he majored in history. He was a member of the 1989 U.S. Ambassador Soccer team and competed throughout Europe. Bilijack is married to Lisa Dickinson Bell, a middle school teacher in the Atlanta area.