Today’s interview is with Shep Hyken, who is the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations and a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. Shep joins me today today to talk about his latest book: I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again, what an Arnie is, the metric that is more important than NPS and CSAT, the difference between a repeat customer and a loyal customer, where true empathy for the customer starts and if self-service can drive customer loyalty and a whole host of other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – We need to start talking about experience leadership – Interview with Peter Cross — and is number 403 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at babelforce for sponsoring my podcast this month.

babelforce is the #1 most flexible platform for contact center service. Pierce Buckley, CEO and Co-founder of babelforce, and his team of telecoms veterans have created a powerful cloud communications solution focused on No-Code integration and automation. Their goal is to break down every barrier to great customer experiences by putting intuitive tools in the hands of people who live and breathe CX.

Pierce and Jonathan Baer of Vonage are running a webinar on the 28th October at 11:00am CET and they will be discussing exactly how businesses are getting maximum benefit from WhatsApp, one of the fastest-growing channels for customer service. Follow this link to sign up. You don’t want to miss out as you will get to see a demo of the babelforce platform in action!

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Shep:

• There’s an obvious nod to Arnie (Arnold Schwarzenegger) with the new book.
• Anytime you get feedback from what happened yesterday is a history lesson.
• There’s a difference between repeat and loyal customers.
• We should measure behavior, not history.
• The one trackable trend that leaders should be monitoring every morning is how many of our previous customers are booked in today.
• We want repeat business because you can’t get loyalty unless the customer starts to come back again and again. But, we also need to understand if they’re coming back again and again.
• I want to create an experience that makes customers want to come back again and again to me even if it’s once every five years.
• The loyalty question: Am I providing the experience that the customer wants? And, you can ask yourself: Is what I’m doing right now good enough that the customer the next time they need whatever it is I sell will come back to me and not a competitor?
• You cannot have loyalty until you start to get people to come back.
• Companies who sell retail items compete against Amazon.
• Every company, even those in the B2B space, are competing against Amazon.
• I had a client say to me the other day: “We ordered a $500,000 piece of equipment and it took several months to place the order. It then shows up unexpectedly earlier…. to the company’s credit. But, they never informed me of that delivery.” And, here’s what my client says to me: “Even when I buy toilet paper from Amazon at least they send me an email to tell me it’s on his way.” He just compared his $500,000 piece of machinery to a roll of toilet paper.
• Stop calling customer service departments the customer service department. I think it should be the revenue generation department or the repeat customer department because if it’s done well that’s exactly what happens.
• To achieve an I’ll Be Back culture it has to baked into your culture.
• Ritz Carlton is an example that is quoted in almost every service book. They describe what and how they do things as “Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.”
• Anybody who wants to empower employees has to trust their employees to do the right thing.
• It’s your internal legends that sometimes create the experiences that you want to emulate and copy throughout the entire organization.
• My definition of loyalty is simply you create this emotional connection to the customer.
• There’s very few companies that can create an emotional connection through a digital platform if there’s never a human to human connection. But, it can be done.
• Recent study of North American consumers show that 41% choose digital self service options on a website rather than having to be put on hold to wait for an agent while 59% prefer to call the company. That latter number keeps falling and the numbers will eventually cross.
• So, if you’re going to have a digital experience, the goal is to create something that’s close to, as far as possible, the positive experience that customers will have with the human human factor. Or, even better if that’s possible.
• Companies can create good digital experiences. Just don’t go overboard and get enamored by the technology.
• Six step process (questions):
  • 1. Why would someone do business with me instead of the competition?
  • 2. Why would a customer to do business with the competition instead of us?
  • 3. What are they doing that we are not and need to adopt and adapt to make it our own so we can keep pace?
  • 4. Who are the companies out there that we love and why?
  • 5. What of those things that they do do we love? Can we adapt and adopt for us?
  • 6. Now that we’re doing this, why would a customer want to come back?
• Shep’s Punk CX word: Outrageous
• Shep’s Punk CX brand: Zappos

About Shep

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert and a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. Shep works with companies and organizations that want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees. His articles have been read in hundreds of publications, and he is the author of 7 books and his newest book I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again will be released September 21, 2021. He is also the creator of The Customer Focus™, a customer service training program that helps clients develop a customer service culture and loyalty mindset.

Grab a copy of his new book: I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again, check out his website: www.hyken.com and connect with him on Twitter @Hyken and LinkedIn here.

Thanks to F Delventhal for the image.