Industry expert Marcia Miller Todd wrote a series of magazine columns in American Drycleaner magazine many years ago, and they were gathered into a book designed to give guidance and wisdom to a generation of counter professionals. Now, the book has been updated, revised and expanded to give the same sage advice to a fresh generation.
This book includes topics like greeting customers, remembering names, selling the company’s services, handling complaints, and more. It also includes questions for discussion at the end of each chapter, and a quiz to test reader comprehension. A Certificate of Achievement is also included to inspire confidence.
“When I was first starting out, Marcia Todd’s book was my bible for training my counter personnel,” said Jan Barlow of Jan’s Professional Dry Cleaners, Clio, MI. “I realized it was still the only training guide out there, and with a little updating and revision, it could make an impact on the industry again.”
Becca Anderson, an industry journalist for over 25 years, updated the writing style and added information to make the book resonate with today’s counter people — without tampering with the personality of the earlier version. The result is a book that is easy to read, pointed in its advice, and gives owners and managers a uniform way of training customer service representatives.
“We’re proud to be able to take a resource that is one-of-a-kind in our industry and update it for today’s needs,” she said. “There is simply nothing else out there that does the job this book does. Great training not only makes a store more profitable, it encourages employees to stay because they feel appreciated and proud of the work they do.”
The book is available on Amazon as both a paperback and an ebook. The cost is $9.99 US for the paperback version, $3.99 for the ebook. Over the Counter is slated for translation into Spanish, French, German and Japanese in the near future.