#20 Insights on Prioritizing Customer Experience for Sustainable Growth
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These customer experience functions are being considered cost centers. In this economic environment, they're on the chopping block.

Because you're looking at them the wrong way. That's a big mistake. Marketing gets people interested in what we do. Sales gets people to buy what we do. Experience, from the very beginning to the very end, gets people to come back to what we do. You can have a great product, and if your experience fails to deliver, the lifetime value of that customer has now churned.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. A quick PSA before we get started. If at any point in this episode or other episodes of ours, you think this show is great,

please let us know by clicking that follow button. That simple click does wonders for our show and will help us to keep bringing bigger and better CX knowledge to all of you. Well, without further ado, I'm going to introduce our guests.

Today, we are speaking to Shep Hyken, a CX expert, speaker, author of seven books, many of which have become New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers. He's also the host of the podcast, Amazing Business Radio, and he's the host of a TV show, Be Amazing or Go Home.

As you can tell, Shep has a lot to share when it comes to customer experience. So today we're going to dive into his most useful tips for business leaders looking to make their customer experience a differentiator. Shep, welcome to the show. I am so excited to be here, Lauren. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so excited to talk to you. I've done a little bit of digging. I've listened to some of your work and you've really been in this space for a very long time. And I want to get into your story. But before I do, you work with many organizations on customer experience. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see companies make that you then go in to help them solve? Wow. Well,

The biggest thing I see is, let's just talk about customer service for a moment because it's part of customer experience. But people say, oh, it's a department and customer experience is kind of a strategy. And I believe that they are philosophies that need to be embraced by everybody in the organization.

Everybody needs to understand what the CX vision is. They need to know what their roles are within the company to deliver on that vision. And I'm talking everybody from the CEO to the most recently hired, somebody on the front line, somebody in a department that never sees the customer, even people in a warehouse who pack up product and just send it out. They need to understand their role and how their jobs impact their

that end user experience. Because if you're not supporting somebody that is directly interacting with the customer or your strategy isn't involving something that directly interacts with the customer, you're supporting somebody or part of a process that does, or you're behind the scenes, you know, really working on developing a better experience. Everything ties together and

many companies seem to segment this and many companies seem to focus on just pieces of it, not the entire bit. It really has to be something that everyone's bought into, creating that great customer experience. And I also really align with what you said about it culminating

comes from the top as well. And I think I've experienced that in my own work as a CX leader, where I feel like I'm kind of in this silo and no one really cares. They're kind of like, go sales, go marketing. And then when it comes to customer service or customer success, it's kind of the afterthought. And then I've been in organizations where the CEO cares about the customer above all else. And the difference is massive.

And I hear it a lot on this show. I don't know. I'd love to hear your thoughts on when you've seen it done really right versus when you see there being an issue. Well, I just wrote an article about and I'm going to go broader than what's in the article. But essentially, a lot of what we're talking about falls in the marketing.

And people seem to put budgets in different places. And customer service specifically sometimes gets thrown into discretionary expenditure when in reality, and it should go into the marketing budget. It's important. Same thing with experience. The CXO and the CMO need to be working together because here's the ultimate thing we want to have happen.

Marketing gets people interested in what we do. Sales gets people to buy what we do. Experience from the very beginning to the very end gets people to come back to what we do. And if we're not focused on that whole picture, as I mentioned earlier, I think we're missing part of it. So where does the budget go? Where does the emphasis go on where we're going to spend? We're doing all kinds of research. Our research is basically consumer research.

understanding what customers think and want. And gosh, I've heard this for maybe 10 or 15 years that one day customer experience is going to be more important than even the product. And just this year, some of the big like Deloitte's and McKinsey's, I'm not exactly sure which one of them has said it yet, but I think they probably have both said it, but they said, hey, it's finally happened.

the product. And think about it. I walk into a mall and I'm just going to go consumer for a moment. We'll go B2B with an example in a second. But I walk into a mall and I want to buy a pair of jeans. If it's a big mall, there might be 20 stores that have jeans and probably half of them have the same jeans, right? And that's a lot of choices. So if I happen to go to a store and you do well, I'm going to come back to you, right? Instead of the other 19 stores. In the B2B world, the stakes are even higher. Right.

Because I may have a product that there may only be five competitors versus 105 or even 1,000 competitors in the B2B space. On top of that, I know Salesforce is behind this. How many Salesforce's really are there? I have a client that sells huge pieces of equipment. About every 12 to 15 years, these big machines are replaced. Where they make their money, though, is not on the sale of the machine. It's the annual contracts as they pay for maintenance and

and upkeep, and upgrades, et cetera, et cetera. So here's what happens. If I fail, and I'm that company, if I fail to deliver on the service, when it comes time to replace that machine, they're going to think about my experience and service failures. This wasn't a great experience. Let's look at the competitor. And there may only be three to five people around the world that sell a machine like this. If I lose that business,

It's a generational mistake. It's 12 to 15 years before I have a shot at getting back into this company. So we have to be, the stakes are just higher. We have to be so much more aware of CX as it applies to the B2B world. You can have a great product. And if your experience fails to deliver, you risked that customer churning. And like you said, the lifetime value of that customer has now churned because of the experience, even if you had the most amazing product.

Let's talk about customer service for a moment. I mean, this also applies to customer success in some cases. But why do you think these customer experience functions are being considered cost centers? And especially in this economic environment, they're on the chopping block. Why is that? Because you're looking at them the wrong way. That's a big mistake.

Let's just talk about the customer service and if you want to call it success, whatever. And when I hear somebody refer to their customer success program, to me, that is somebody that's already bought and they were being proactive and helping them be more successful with their product. We're not responding to a question. That's more in the customer support department.

And I also try to get my clients to stop using the word customer service department because it's not the service department, it's the support department. All right, so the question you asked is why are these on the chopping block? Why aren't they seeing it? They're seeing it as an expense rather than, like I said, it doesn't cost, it should pay.

You have to turn it around. The people who are taking care of your customers, their job is to make them happy when they get off the phone. If it's a support call, what did I do at this moment to make sure that customer is happy enough that they're going to want to do business with me again? Now, that is a great question. You've got NPS on the what's the likelihood you'd recommend us? Were you satisfied?

How about this question? If you had a problem and had to talk to our technical support team again,

Do you want to use this person or would you rather have somebody else? That's a great question. That's going to tell me a lot about that particular interaction and the way it was handled. And by the way, even if they don't give me the answer that I want and the help that I need, depending on how they handled it, I might still give them a really high mark for that person. So you can ask several questions based on this interaction, not just the person, but the outcome.

Would you want to use this again? And a lot of people are very concerned about, oh, if I really liked the person, I didn't get my question answered, but they were so nice. What kind of rating am I really going to give them? But at the end of the day, we need to understand that our job in the support world is to make sure the customer comes back.

which is why we need to maybe refer to us as the anti-churn department, the revenue generation department, because if we do a great job, the repeat customer, we know it. They buy more, they spend more on every average interaction. And you mentioned lifetime value, the customer, it goes up because if they don't come back, it's over. Completely. There were a couple stats that you had shared in a recent annual report that I just wanted to highlight for everyone. Uh-oh, I got to remember them. Yeah.

I'll tell you. I'll tell you what they are. 76% of customers will go out of their way to go to a company that has better customer service. Yes. I could not agree with that more. I mean, as someone who works in CX, I am a hawk for good customer service and bad customer service. But regardless...

The consumer feels it. You also said 86% of customers would switch to a competing brand or company if they found out they provided a better customer experience. Yep. This is where competition is not just about the vertical you're in or the business you're in. It's actually that we are looking at other customer experiences and judging them.

you right on that experience which i want to come back to that and then one last stat i wanted to read 82 of customers trust a company or brand more if they provide an excellent customer service experience who do you want to do business with you want to do business with people you know you like and you trust trust is higher when the experience is better trust is not something soft it is actually tangible and if you take a look at david horseager who's like the trust guru at

At least I think he is. He's got all kinds of trust reports that come out annually. You'll see the difference between churn, lifetime value goes up, et cetera, et cetera, if you get the customer to trust you. And as we look at the customer's hierarchy of needs, which is a little model that I put together similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs,

At the bottom line, at the bottom of the base of the pyramid, products are supposed to do what they're supposed to do. And if they don't, nobody's going to buy it, right? But then as you start to go up the pyramid, trust becomes really important. Do I trust this company? Do they do what they say they're going to do? I want an experience that's predictable. I want an experience where I could say they always are knowledgeable when I call. They always help me. When I reach out, they always get back to me. Even if there's a problem, I know they're always going to help me solve it.

it. So that word always kind of ties into the predictability, which is all about trust. And without trust and a consistent experience, you're not going to get loyalty. All right. So let's talk about these other two stats. 76% go out of their way. 86% of customers would switch. Right. So here's the point of those two. Number one,

You also said something in all of this that was really important. Our customers don't compare us to direct competition anymore. They compare us to the best experiences they've ever had. If I'm a consumer, I'm going to compare you to all my consumer experiences. If I'm in B2B, guess what? I'm going to compare you to all my consumer experiences.

How's that? Because I'm a consumer regardless of who I do and what I do. And if I'm in procurement for a machine company and buying little widgets, I can still say, why can't they be as good as Amazon or Apple or one of the other great companies that seem to always hit the top of the list for great experiences? So recognize that.

and that your benchmark becomes higher because the customer expects more. Ideally, you don't just want to be as good or better than your competitor. You want to be considered world-class in the class of these other great companies. You don't need to be recognized because you may not be as well-known as Amazon. But imagine that I say to you in the B2B world, I love doing business with that company. Why? They've got an inside sales rep. That person's been there for 15 years.

I hear from them every three months. They tell me ahead of time when there's going to be a delay. They are always on top of it. I don't even have to think about it. Wow, what an experience. I wish everybody would be that good. And you could go to Amazon and say, and by the way, if I'm doing a speech and I just say to the audience, hey, somebody raise your hand and tell me what your favorite company to do business with.

Eight out of 10 times, if not even more, they're going to say Amazon or Apple, but mostly Amazon. And why? Because they trust Amazon. They know that when the order is placed, they get confirmation. When it's shipped, they get a tracking number. When it arrives, they get a picture of it leaning up against their door. Then they get a picture of the porch pirate stealing the item. No, I'm just kidding about that. But there's all this trust and confidence that's created along with the system. All right.

So let's now talk about these other two stats. There is a new stat that I have. It's not yet published, but a number of years ago, Vanderbilt University professors, Anthony J. Zahorek and Roli T. Russ did a study. And I was fascinated by this finding. They said between, I believe it was between 20 and 40% of customers don't come back even if they're satisfied.

So for years, I've been saying the reason they don't come back is because they're just satisfied. It wasn't great. It wasn't over the top. I have come to understand over the years that on a scale of one to five, where one is bad and five is excellent, three is in the middle. Three is satisfactory. That means you are average.

Average means you're okay. How was everything? It was fine. What does fine mean? Fine is like the F-bomb of customer experience. It's a four-letter word. It starts with F. F stands for fake smile. I is insincere feedback. N is I'm never going to come back, even though I'm smiling and I told you it's fine. And E is it's emotionless, right? So I've talked about this before. It's one of my favorite ideas. Fine. Now, unless I said,

Boy, I like your haircut. That is a mighty fine haircut. If I put an adjective in front of it, it's okay. All right. But what do we need to do to get a five on a scale of one to five if three is satisfactory? We just need to be a little bit better, but we need to be consistently a little bit better. Once in a while, if a big problem falls in our lap, we get to go crazy and take care of it. Or there's another way of exceeding expectations.

And that's just to always meet the expectation. Earlier in our conversation, I said, they're always so knowledgeable. They always get back to me. Always in front of something means there's a consistency and I can, and they always are meeting what I want. And by the way, I always finish always what's behind that is usually something that's pretty common sense. So,

Now we understand average is not good enough. The reason people were going elsewhere, I surmise, I never really talked to the professors, but satisfactory was just like average. So I decided this year to try to get the answer. And what I found is 20 some odd percent

who had that satisfactory experience, the likelihood of them coming back is much reduced. Now, when you add to that the two stats that you said, that 87% would go somewhere if they knew it was better, if all you do is offer average, nobody's complaining about fine. They just move on. That's why that stat's important. And I'm willing to go out of my way a little bit further, maybe a little extra effort,

76% will go out of their way. I might drive an extra mile. I might spend a little bit of extra time. I might be willing to wait an extra day or two for the product to come in, depending upon the shipping. So keep these stats in mind. They become real important when you start to make decisions about investing, to your point earlier in our conversation, investing in the initiative that you have in customer service and experience. Yeah. Thank you for outlining all of that.

What are some things that... That's a long answer. It's a long answer, but I'm here for it because I think these types of statistics really help business leaders to see the importance. And if there's anything to take away from this episode, it is the importance of customer experience and how that is your competitive advantage.

I'd love to understand from you, what are a couple of things, like let's say the top three actions, if you can, that a business should be doing in order to move from a three to a five?

Well, first of all, you have to decide you want to do it. And that needs to come from leadership. And I'm going to go through a process that creates the culture for you. I'll give you, I'll do it in like a minute. Okay. And if you want me to expand on any of this, I can't, but I have this six step process. So it has to start at the top where leadership defines what the experience vision is. It's one sentence long or shorter.

The Ritz-Carlton, where ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen, is a great vision statement. And everybody who works there knows it, and it drives them. Number two, communicate it. Communicate it often. This isn't a flavor of the month or the year for the theme. It is all the time. Most likely, this vision statement is found in your mission and values already. We just need to pull it out and make it a single standalone statement. Number three,

Everybody gets trained. Earlier, I told you everybody needs to know their responsibility and role and how they impact the experience. So everybody needs to be trained on how to deliver regardless of what they do on this experience vision. Number four is leaders have to be role models. You can't treat, especially people who are on the front line, you can't treat them one way and expect them to then talk to customers and treat them differently.

But same thing with people behind the scenes. If you beat up people behind the scenes verbally and mentally, how do you expect them to do their best? Number five, the leaders, and I really want to go toward the top, is they need to defend the culture. If you're creating this culture and you see a department, a person, a

a country out of alignment with what your vision is, you need to go in and defend it and make sure you bring people back to it. And finally, number six, celebrate it when it works. If it's working well, let people know they're doing a great job.

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And you just took us into a topic that I absolutely love, which is culture and how the employee experience is so connected to the customer experience. I know that you speak about this often. I'd love to hear your opinion of what that connection really is, the employee experience and the customer experience. My favorite thing to say is what's happening on the inside is felt on the outside.

So whatever that employee experience is, you can't expect the customer experience to be really much different than that. I think the best way to think of it is I call it the employee golden rule. Do unto your employees as you went done unto your customers, if not even a little bit better so they can really get the point of what it's all about. I think that's important. Empower them to do their jobs.

And this is really brand new material for me that I've been working on. And that is understanding that maybe the employee experience isn't really where it starts. It might start in the hiring process, the applicant experience.

If you go to work at Disney, Disney, you're going to eventually you do things online. They tell you a little bit about what the role is you'll be applying for or what you might be getting. They try to teach you a little bit about the culture. If you make the grade and can get into a live interview, you go to the casting center. That's what they call it because they're they're they're putting on the show for the guests and.

So you're going to the casting center. And when you go to open the door, it's a replica of the Snow White or Alice in Wonderland doorknob. I think it's Alice in Wonderland, the big doorknob. So you're immediately being brought into their culture. While you're waiting for your interview, you're watching videos about what you're going to be doing. Their goal is to get you to understand who they are and what you're getting into or to let you disqualify yourself. I don't think I want any part of this. This is not where I want to be.

So it's a great way they're bringing people in. And then, of course, the applicant experience. How do you treat them as they're getting hired? Are you getting them excited about the job? And then I go a step further. Some of these larger companies and some of these people are my clients. And we talked about this.

Like in Amazon, if you have thousands of jobs you're hiring for, you have tens of thousands of applicants. I'm going to bet most of those applicants are your customers. So if you don't handle the application and potential hiring of this person, if you have to turn them down, are you doing it in such a way that would still keep them as a customer? So consider that. Yeah. I love that you were bringing this up because I always...

think about the employee experience as like, I would like to look at the employee experience, like the employee journey, just as we do with the customer journey. And we look at the initial moment of introduction throughout the entire life cycle of the customer. We need to do that with the employee as well. And it starts with that application experience. And I've seen this so many times where that, you know, the job hiring process companies are really busy. They're doing a lot

that's just kind of an afterthought. They just need butts in seats and they need to onboard them and get them going. But by the time the person is now facing the customer or even by the time that new hire is just in their onboarding, they either feel really excited about it or they feel like they have kind of lost some trust with the company because of the way the applicant experience has gone. And I think it's so important that we do really look at the employee experience

with the same eye, the same critical eye as we would our customer experience, because those two things just do go hand in hand. You want your employees to be ambassadors for your company, and you don't do that by treating them the wrong way from the very, very beginning, which is when they're considering working for you. Yeah. I see a lot of

of people posting on LinkedIn right now, how hard it has been searching for jobs in the past year. And so many people are writing about how recruiters are not getting back to them. They are being ghosted. They're just having these really terrible applicant experiences. And I get it. Companies are swamped with applications. Like I fully understand that side of the story, but at the same time, I

I think we can be doing better to create that ambassadorship of people who are saying, hey, I want to dedicate my life like for the foreseeable future to your company. That's a really big thing. If someone's applying for a job at your company, it says a lot. And so I do think like we need to keep them as customers and have those people still be ambassadors. They've looked into your company. They know a lot about it. They can speak to it.

So let's give them some respect. Yeah. So two things there. Number one, I think communication is so important. And I'll give you a very generic example of this. I'm sitting on an airplane and the pilot comes on and says, we have a mechanical difficulty. Everybody, oh,

But here's what I'm going to do for you. Every 10 minutes, I'm going to come back on. I promise. I'm going to tell you what we're doing and what the status is. And people go, oh, you know why? They're not happy that they're being delayed. They're happy they're getting information. Why can't we do the same thing that we would, you know, that pilot or that captain's doing with the passenger, his customer or her customer? Why can't we do the same thing for applicants? Here's where you are in the application process.

You know, I go on to, you know, UPS, USPS, FedEx. I track a package. It shows me it's in this city. It's in that city. It's out for delivery. We can do the same thing for applicants. Number two idea. I have a philosophy I call creating the fun environment. Now, fun is not fun. Ha ha ra ra. Let's go have a great time. Fun stands for it's an acronym. F-U-N. Fulfillment, uniqueness and next.

So in one of my books, The Amazement Revolution, one of my chapters was devoted to the culture and I use different case studies and interview different people. Brian Keeley, who just last year retired from Baptist Health South as their CEO, or maybe he was the chairman. He had a great philosophy. I want to create something called a destination employment, which meant when you come to work for me, I don't ever want you to want to leave and go anywhere else. Well, how does that happen?

Three things. Number one, we want to fulfill this person. We want them to have a job that they enjoy, that they're proud of. Number two, we want to exploit them. You is unique. What do they do that's unique to them? What's like their big talent? Can we take some of that talent and put it in the job? And, you know, if you're loving, you know, engineering and coding, that's a unique talent

compared to most, you're going to go seek out a job to be a coder. So if I put you in that job, you're probably going to love it. But what if I put you in a job that doesn't require coding, but that's what you really love to do, right? Well, I've got an idea. This is what Google does. They let their engineers who aren't doing what they love to do, choose a project they love to do and spend a small portion of the week working on that project.

And this does wonders for their fulfillment because you're exploiting them for their unique talent. Maybe it's a language that somebody speaks. And you know what? We have a customer that speaks that language. Would you please talk to them? Because we can't. And all of a sudden, this person just lights up. All right. So that's fulfillment uniqueness. And then N stands for next. What are we doing to get our employees excited about what's happening in our organization?

What's next? Is it a new release of a software package? Is it a new branch that we're going to build? Is it a new extension on the building? Is everybody getting an upgrade in their offices because we're moving? What gets people excited? Maybe people just love their job so much they can't wait for the next day, which is a wonderful place for somebody to be. Mm-hmm.

Completely. And also just to underscore what you just shared is having fun. If you have fun at work, like we can, we kind of have two choices. We can either go to work and just slog all day and then can't wait to leave so we can go home and finally enjoy ourselves or we can go to work and enjoy ourselves. And I think it's,

100% the responsibility of the leaders to make sure that we have a fun environment, that we mix things up a little bit, that we, you know, instead of just going into a boardroom and being like, here's what we're going to do today. Like,

Maybe we can make that a little bit more enjoyable. Ask different employees for stories or come up with a game. I just read a really, really amazing book called The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. I highly suggest every leader read it. And one of the commitments is to have fun at work. And they give you some examples of things to do. Like for example, it's

If someone's sharing a report, a business report of, you know, what happened this quarter, can you like give them a character to act out as they do it? You know, like, can you can you make that a bit more exciting and actually drive more engagement in the process? So I think there's a lot of different things we can do.

including all of which you just shared and how we can make work more enjoyable. And then employees will pass that on to the customer. I think we've all had experiences where we call a customer service hotline and someone answers the phone who does not want to talk to you. They don't care. They don't want to help you solve your problem. They're just like there to do their jobs so that they can leave. And then on the flip side,

I'm sure we've all had experiences where we had a lovely conversation and spoke to someone who was incredibly helpful. And we left that conversation with a smile on our face. Which one do we want to have? Yeah, it's the culture. And by the way, before our office went total remote, it was really weird because we had fun at work. We would have lunches every week or so where we all got together as a team. So I appointed somebody as the HR manager. Now, most people think that's human resource management.

I referred to that person as the humor resource manager, H-U-M-O-R. And every day during COVID, when we were away, we would have three meetings, opening meeting, midday meeting, end of day meeting, where we all got together. And the midday meeting was usually over lunch. We all got together. And this person was responsible either for herself or one of us on the team, finding a video on YouTube that would make us laugh.

And that was her humor resource manager. And it was so much fun. But I am tired of her cat videos because that seemed to be a theme. I love cats, but just not that much. Okay.

I would probably be eating it up. So whenever I'm having a bad day, I'm like, I'm just going to watch some cat videos because that'll solve my problems. I did something similar with a remote team where I had a happiness committee and we had three employees who were in charge of

they had a budget and they were in charge of making sure that the team was happy. And I treated it like a typical project where I would say, here's the, here's the outcome I want. You go, you brainstorm, you think about what it is you need. What's the plan that you're going to put in place. And they came back and gave me so many amazing ideas. Like we would share on Slack every Monday, a, we would like answer a question. So she would be like, Brittany,

Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera or like, uh, like which one did you like? Or like on Wednesdays we would share a photo of,

our favorite vacation or prom photo or something. And so it was just like, and there were so many more things I could spend a whole episode talking about what the happiness committee came up with. But the point was, was that they had so much fulfillment in coming up with the ideas. The team was so excited that these were things that they actually wanted to be doing and talking about. And we all just had a better time. And I actually, our team had the highest employee engagement score out of a 1400 person company. So-

It went pretty far. Think about, we spend at least a third, if not more of our days at work. And I mean, I know I love to work. So to me, I've been retired for years because I believe retirement is doing what you love. And I love everything I've been doing, other than some of the paperwork, I will admit. But most of it is wonderful. Not everybody feels the same way I do. But if we're going to have them here, let's make sure that

you know, they're happy and they're fulfilled and that they don't want to go anywhere else. And wouldn't it be nice to have a pipeline of applicants waiting for somebody to retire so that they can come in? That's the place that we want to be. And if we're doing that internally, you're going to see outside results with the customer. You can go to glassdoor.com and you can check out the highest rated companies to work for.

And then you can go over to all of the different places like ACSI mentioned earlier, that will give you stats on the best companies to do business with. There's no coincidence that they're kind of neck and neck as far as best companies, best places to work. A lot of them are on the same list.

There are employees, and I say this, that it's not about paying them a lot of money. It's creating fulfillment where the money isn't as important. Because we all know, if you look at all the stats, people don't always leave for money. As a matter of fact, money's pretty far down on the list. They leave because, just like in the customer experience stats,

They think there's going to be something better. Maybe their manager is a problem. So they would love to find a different manager to work for, even though they work for a company they might like. So they're leaving because of people and experiences, not because of money. And we need to keep that in mind. Although I did Maslow's hierarchy of needs version for the employee hierarchy of needs. And just as a customer needs a product to work, the employee does need a paycheck.

But if you go to Disney, people have been there for 25 years. They're not paid nearly as high as other people in other organizations that have been somewhere 25 years. But when you talk to these Disney employees, they go, I just love working here. I'm not going to go anywhere else. Mm-hmm.

Totally. And it's one of the most highly recognized companies in the world. So there's something to say about that. Shep, I'm curious. You've been in this business for a really long time. I'm curious to know what got you into it. And then I'd also love to understand, what are you doing with organizations to really help them improve their customer experiences? Wow.

What got me into this business was I'm a very customer focused individual. I'm 12 years old. I started my first business, which was a birthday party magic show business.

Came home after being paid $16 for a birthday party. I remember I was just 12 years old. That was a long time ago. Today, that $16 is worth like $2,412 with inflation. But anyway, it was a school night. My mom says, what are you doing after dinner? I thought homework was the right answer, but it wasn't. She says, after you write a thank you note, you do your homework. Okay, first lesson in customer experience or service.

appreciate your customer. I already said thank you when I walked out the door and they gave me my money. But follow up, little after experience. My dad says, great idea. Send the note next week, call them and thank them again. The parents that booked you, thank them again and ask them how they liked the show. And they'll tell you, ask them specifically what tricks did you like the best?

And I go, that's a great idea. He goes, well, after you do this a bunch of times, you'll notice some of the same answers and you'll notice they talk about the same tricks. So if they aren't talking about certain tricks, get rid of those and replace them with magic tricks they will talk about. I said, great idea. Now, as I look back, that's called showing appreciation, getting feedback, and

and operationalizing the feedback and process improvement. And I'm learning this at 12. And I was doing at one point, eight to 10 magic shows every week when I was like 13, 14, 15 years old. My parents had to hire a high school kid to drive me around because they couldn't drive me to so many shows. And as I think back and what am I going to do with my life? I get out of college and I'm thinking, what do I want to do? I saw a couple of motivational speakers and

And I thought, you know, I could do that. And by the way, I graduated from birthday parties to working for corporate events. And I worked in comedy clubs while I was in college. So I decided I was going to be a professional speaker after watching these guys. I went to the bookstore, which back then was like one shelf of business books. And I could tell you the three books that I bought in search of excellence, Ron Zimke and Carl Albrecht's two books about customer service, Service America and America at Your Service.

You think they could have buried the title a little bit more? But anyway, those are the three books that I bought. And I thought, okay, why am I drawn to these books? Because ever since I was a kid, I was taught to take care of my customers. And by the way, I love the feedback customers gave me when I did that. So that's why I just became addicted to the idea of service and experience.

And when I started, it was all service. It was all customer service. How does a customer get treated? In 1988, 89, I started focusing on internal service, which is the employee experience. And then somebody real smart said, customer experience is a fancy word for customer service. Let's call it that.

smart people. Guess what I realized? Over time, I started looking at the great leaders, guys like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. They started to recognize that experience was the broadest possible thing. It was every interaction the customer had, not just these moments where we're interacting for support or for sales. So I thought, okay, it gets even bigger and better, and I'm so excited. So I see my career as

is just as people get promoted to the next level, I see everything I'm learning from all these companies and observing and researching. It's like taking me to higher and higher levels of understanding what this whole experience thing is all about. I just love it. I'm addicted to it. And I don't know if you can tell, I'm a little enthusiastic about it. I love it. I'm right there with you. And so how do you help companies? If you sat next to me on an airplane and said, Shep, what do you do for a living? I

I would ask you a question in return. Have you ever walked away from a company and thought, wow, that was a great experience or wow, that was the nicest person. Well, that's what I help my clients do. So they do this a number of ways. They hire me to speak. And I know I've done a number of jobs with Salesforce. I've worked with some of the greatest companies at their conferences. We also have training and that's more customer service training. But one of my guys, he's amazing, had a really high level job.

at a publicly held company. And when he took early retirement, he came to work with me and we talked to them about culture and he goes in and he shifts the culture. And we work with some great brands, bigger companies than I could ever imagine working for helping them with this. So we do that. Plus I write books and I do influencer work for some of the people in the industry. I have a good time doing this. A lot of variety, a lot of fun. Amazing.

So I kind of want to ask you the same question that you would ask someone on an airplane. What is a recent experience that you've had with a brand that left you impressed? I just wrote about this. A moment of misery turned into a moment of magic. I was on a flight. So it all started when I was being interviewed by somebody and she shared a story that she was on an airplane from Madrid to London, getting ready to take off.

And the captain came on and said, everybody, I've got to get you off the plane right away. Don't panic. But we spotted a scorpion on the plane. Yeah.

And it's run off and we don't know where it is. We can't get to it. You got to get off the plane. We don't want anybody getting stung by a scorpion. And everybody was happy to get off the plane, right? And they switched them to a new plane. It took a few hours, but they got them all taken care of. And then I responded, well, you won't believe what happened to me just last night. I was flying home and we took a delay, a mechanical delay. Captain comes on and says, we're really sorry, mechanical delay.

And this the example I gave you were every few minutes they came back about every 15 minutes he came back on. He said he'd keep us up to date. He finally took us off the plane. He said, I don't think this is going to get fixed anytime soon. We're about 90 minutes into the delay. Let's all get off the plane, but don't leave the boarding area. I'm going to come out in a few moments.

Well, he didn't come out, but another captain who was actually a passenger on the plane, still worked. I won't tell you the name of the airline, but their initials are AA for Anonymous Airlines or American Airlines, but no, American Airlines. They handled this so well.

And people, they didn't seem all that disappointed that there was a delay, which there were a few people that said, oh, I'm going to miss a connection or whatever. And they were getting taken care of. But we all walked off and this captain came out and said, I just talked to the captain. I told him to stay down there and keep talking to maintenance. Let me tell you what's going on. And he says, we are going to get a new airplane. This is how it's. And when he was done, the people in the gate area, they gave him applause, right?

And it wasn't like he was that funny or he told, but he was so honest and forthright. And back to the whole thing we talked about at the beginning, trust. And as a result, I looked at the person next to me, I go, look at that, a standing ovation. Well, of course they were all standing around. Okay. But I joke about that. But then there were four people on the team that were helping the customers that were having problems.

One of them was somebody that was helping me. I'm lucky enough to have that concierge key status on American Airlines, which is a really high level where they really go out of their way to take care of you. Well, after she took care of me and told me what was going on and said she'd be happy to give me a ride to the next gate, which I didn't need, but.

She started helping people that weren't concierge key people. She was helping her colleagues take care of the last two or three customers or passengers. And I thought to myself, there's three things happening here. Number one is the open communication. May not be what we want to hear, but you're telling us what we need to hear. And if it's not good news, it's like a band-aid. Rip it off fast. Give us the information. Number two, there was transparency. The

The captain and his team were very transparent in making us understand what was going on. And number three, as I looked at the team at American Airlines, including Tracy, who was helping me from Concierge Key, I recognize they get it. It's a team sport. Everybody's helping everybody make sure that these last few passengers are taken care of. I think that's a pretty good formula for success. 100%.

I always say we don't want our customers to wonder what's happening because when people start to wonder, then they start to go down the black hole rabbit hole of everything's bad. This isn't going well. Oh, no. And if we are just proactive and giving them little bits of information, people appreciate it so, so much.

- Yeah, it's like a sense of control they have, even though they have no control, what they do have is control of their feelings. - 100%. One last question for you. I think you've already given us a lot of this, but I ask this to every guest.

What is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should hear? Make it the culture, not a department, not a strategy. Make it philosophical and ingrained into everything about the company. And when you add that to the level of all your strategy and tactics, you will deliver a better experience overall.

I love that so much. Well, Shep, thank you so much for coming on the show, for speaking to us about the business case of customer experience, the culture importance about trust. I've really loved this conversation and I hope all of our listeners do as well. I'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much for having me, Lauren. Can't wait to come back. Thank you.

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