#109 Shep Hyken: Building A Memorable Customer Experience
We’ve all heard that the customer is king, but today let’s hear from the king of customer experience himself! We’re honored to welcome Shep Hyken as a guest on this episode of The Ecom Show.
With over 39 years of industry experience and over eight bestselling books under his belt, Shep Hyken is a master at building a memorable customer experience, and today he’s going to let us in on some of his bestselling secrets. Make sure to check out hyken.com to know more about him and get access to bonus research materials to enhance your knowledge of customer experience.
This show is sponsored by Budai media , which is a fully remote eCommerce retention marketing agency. We, at Budai Media, have worked with over 100+ eCommerce clients and generated $30M+ additional store revenue in the last 3 years.
In this episode, Shep Hyken and Daniel Budai, our podcast host and CEO, will talk about:
✔️ Shep’s Journey With Customer Experience.
✔️ How To Win Your Customer’s Confidence.
✔️ Finding Balance With Customer Automation.
✔️ 6 Steps To Master Customer Experience.
Shep’s Journey With Customer Experience
Shep’s story starts just like Harry Potter’s, with a little bit of magic. Young Shep ventured into the world of business as a magician back when he was just 12 years old. He would book gigs performing magic for kids at birthday parties, and that’s where he got his first lesson in customer service. His parents taught him all the basics like sending out thank you notes, following up for feedback and finding out areas of improvement, and basically just everything related to the art of talking to people.
This art was finessed by a series of odd jobs that he’d picked up during his years in college.
From nightclubs to corporate events, Shep had done it all. However, his true passion for building a career in the world of customer experience was fuelled by his time working in a gas station.
"I was working in a gas station, and it was a very cold, cold day, and I pumped a woman’s gasoline for her. And a very elderly woman, probably in her 80s, I didn’t want her to get out of the car and get cold. And my manager actually yelled at me for helping her. I learned two things that day that has stuck with me ever since. Number one, people like me are all over the place; we want to take care of people. So when we’re talking to our clients about customer service, and hiring people for the right experience in the right culture, just know that you need to find someone who likes taking care of people.
The second thing I learned was that your experience of how to treat your customers comes from the people training you and the people in charge. But just because someone is in a high position doesn’t mean they know how to treat customers right. You need to hire based on qualities that complement the role you’re trying to fill."
Shep started out working in customer service and soon started using the term customer experience to define his role because he was told that it’s just a fancier term for customer service. But, he soon realized that customer experience goes far beyond customer service; it includes every touchpoint of a customer’s journey that affects their perception of the brand.
With over 39 years of experience, Shep is now a well-known keynote speaker and the bestselling author of several valuable books that talk about customer experience.
How To Win Your Customer’s Confidence
In e-commerce solutions, you have to recognize that you won’t always have the opportunity to interact and create a relationship with your customers. So, you need to find other ways to make that customer say, they are the ones I want to go back to again and again. Basically, find that one thing that drives your customer to keep returning.
And that one thing is confidence! Creating confidence means the customer will refer to you with the word always followed by something ideally positive. You never want your customers to be confident about having a negative experience. Now, I’m confident when I do business with them; I will love what happens. That’s what we’re looking for.
And this is what a confident customer would sound like:
“You know what, it’s always there when I log on, it’s always easy. They always have what I want. They always answer my questions; they always get back to me quickly.”
The key to gaining your customers’ confidence is very simple. Focus on how you can create positive experiences for them throughout their customer journey. As long as the customer recognizes that whenever they reach out or interact, they’re always going to have a positive experience, they’ll keep coming back.
You can create this positive experience by leveraging automation tools, creating self-service resource libraries, having a quick response team in place, and providing a seamless customer journey from pre to post-sales.
Finding Balance With Customer Automation
Automation is a great tool that can enhance customer experience if implemented in the right manner. Having an omnichannel customer support system is the ideal way to provide an excellent customer experience. The trick is to have a seamless handoff between automation and human experience. For instance: If your customer asks a question that the chatbot isn’t able to answer, your chatbot should be advanced enough to hand over the customer’s query to a human executive to take over.
So, automation is really just one part of it. You can create an automated experience by having a smart resource library, a chatbot and by implementing automated flows in place. However, you shouldn’t depend on automation for everything. Tomorrow, if your customer needs to speak to a human, they should have a medium to connect with and receive help from one. All the best companies find a balance between AI-infused technology and humans to create a wholesome customer experience.
Shep Hyken recently conducted an in-depth survey to find out the ideal way that customers like to resolve their complaints when they run into an issue. This 30-page report gives a detailed outlook on customer preferences; you can check out the entire report here. This report revealed that 65% of customers would prefer to resolve their problems over a phone call with a customer service agent; now keep in mind that the rest, 35% prefer having a digital self-service solution which is why it’s important to have both in place.
6 Steps To Master Customer Experience
Shep Hyken had come up with a six-step checklist for brands that are looking to audit and improve their customer experience. This checklist takes you from the entire customer journey to reflecting and learning from competitors and brands that you love and use as an individual. Let’s take a look at the different steps.
- Act like there’s a problem and call and see how hard it is to get your problem resolved: This helps you figure out how smooth your customer journey is and what your areas of improvement are.
- Ask yourself why somebody chooses to do business with a competitor instead of you: Don’t try to find your positives to answer this question; instead, focus solely on what your competitors are offering and find out what they’re doing differently. This will automatically lead you to step three.
- What can I do that my competitor is already doing: Remember that you’re not looking to do things exactly how your competitor does it. The point of this step is to find inspiration and alter it in a way that makes it your own.
- Identify brands that you love as a consumer that are outside your industry: Every professional is also a customer. Find brands that you love, regardless of their size or industry, and figure out qualities that make you loyal to that brand. Try to observe and understand the behavior of brands that you have a likeness for.
- See how your observations can better your brand: Say, for instance, you love Amazon because they’re reliable with their deliveries. When you properly observe, you’ll realize that the reason you love Amazon is not that you receive emails; it’s because you receive information that makes you feel confident, which brings us to the final step.
- Take a look at all of the different reasons a customer does business with your competitor or the reasons why you love doing business with somebody even outside of the industry, and implement those: Once you’ve done that, you’ll automatically find areas that you can improve on.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to check out episode 107, where Daniel speaks with Steven Van Belleghem, another customer experience wizard who reveals some of the best customer experience strategies for e-commerce.
Stay tuned because we come out with new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday! And if you’d like to see more, you can check out some of our earlier episodes here.
Follow Shep Hyken:
Follow Daniel Budai:
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
You Might Like
