This man is incredible. His name is Shep Hyken. He's the

chief amazement officer at Shepherd presentations. And I'm

telling you, this guy is one of the very, very best out there in

the world, talking about customer service. He's a New

York Times and Wall Street Journal, Best Selling Author and

Hall of Fame speaker, yep. Thank you for being on the show,

brother.

It is an honor, a pleasure. I'm flattered, you're

too nice.

You've got all these great books on customer service. And

what's different?

Well, I said, What if I found one company to use

for the entire book as a role model, and looking for a company

that's a rock star, but not recognized as a rock star, and

that was Ace Hardware Business Week recognized the top 25

customer service brands. Rich was rated number 12, and I love

the Ritz Carlton, one of my favorite, favorite hotel change.

Guess what? Eight hardware was rated number 10. That opened my

eye. The World Headquarters is a multi billion dollar

corporation, but if you're a small entrepreneurial business,

they have 4600 stores owned by 3000 different owners, and

that's Mom and Pop. And here's what they've done. They've

managed to operationalize the word helpful. They want to be

the most helpful stores on the planet, especially in their

industry, which is home improvement and hardware, and

they have to compete against some pretty big companies, I

mean, and the Home Depot or Lowe's or Menards go up right

now and be big. Big Box stores is who they had to compete

against. It was David versus Goliath. And you know, who wins?

What are the things that customers really want today in

terms of being helpful? How do we demonstrate? Or do you have

any examples?

First of all, what customers want is they decide

what it is that they want. Do they want the lowest price in

town where they need help with something, or do they need

support, or they want value? And by the way, there you can get a

hybrid. You can't always get the lowest price and the best

service, though, helpful means in the in the case of a target,

where it means very knowledgeable, because you walk

in with the part and they go, Hey, I need this. Can you help

me and tell me what to do with it? And their people are very

knowledgeable. They're trained well, that's part of their their

whole thing. Cluster staff extremely well. You're not going

to have to go walking around, you know, the aisles, looking

for someone to help you. That's important. So I think

convenience staff properly, without having to wait a long

time, knowledgeable people, all that goes toward helpful and

then, you know, having principles in place, like one of

the ideas that one of the retailers told me is that we

have this idea that it takes one to say yes, but two to say no,

which means that that frontline person has to figure out a yes

solution for the customer, or he's got to get permission to

say no to the customer from a manager, and the manager really

doesn't want to be bothered. But when's the last time you act for

something and to get approval, someone said, Hold on, I have to

check with my manager.

So okay, so here's a question. So one of the things

you talk about is moments of magic, and you also talk about

moments of misery. What separates moments of magic from

moments of mediocrity.

And mediocrity is my term for average, satisfactory,

just okay, and a moment of magic is and it's not necessarily blow

me away. Wow me, it's just better than average. And so if

you just take that moment, that interaction, and you bump it up

just a notch, and by the way, once the while, you bump it up a

lot more given an opportunity to do so, but it could be just a

consistent positive attitude, something that's better than

average. And when you spring the moments of magic along, and

they're they're consistent, that puts you in what I call the zone

of amazement. Shall be fun. Words, amazement, mediocrity,

misery, you know magic. So really, the big difference

between mediocrity and magic is just being a little above

average, because anybody can be average, and anybody could

create a moment of magic some of the time, but the goal is make

it happen all of the time. That's the key consistency. If

you go into your Nordstrom department store, what you get

is very consistent. People engage you, they help you, and

they have some pretty good, I call lack of policies in place,

meaning that the salesperson can go from one department to the

next with you and help you throughout the entire store. You

know, take, you know, I'm a man, and I want to buy my wife

something that guy will take or the gal take me upstairs the

women's department. You don't get that in other stores. Now,

that's consistent throughout their entire organization. And

you know what? They don't blow me away. They're just

consistently really good, better than average. Sometimes, you

know, and that by itself, makes them way above average. So you

hire the right people, and you train them to your system, and

then you say, Now go out there. And you know what is it? Go

forth and multiply. Go forth and prosper.

Brilliant. Brilliant stuff, this kind of coming back.

Here's my question for you. You know, as far as providing

amazing customer service, how do I get my front line to care

about customer service? In other words, if I'm the entrepreneur,

I'm the owner or I'm the manager, how do I get the people

on the front line to care about this, right?

Well, first of all, recognize. Is that if they

aren't willing to care, they shouldn't be hired to begin

with. So it starts at the hiring process. You know, do the

background. One of the people that I interviewed for the last

book was American Express. I interviewed their senior VP of

World Service, and one of the things he talked about, it's,

rather than hire people from the call center industry, he looked

for people that had hospitality background, people that work in

a hotel or a restaurant, because he says those people know how to

take care of people. If that's important, look at the right

kind of person that you're hiring. Nordstrom talked about

how they don't really train their people to be as good as

they do the parents train them. They didn't take what they

already know and they make it work for their system. I mean,

isn't that great? And so same thing with ace. They hire the

right people and then they train them. Training is so important,

it's really difficult to throw somebody into the fire there and

say, Okay, now get out real quick without any kind of

training.

Let's say I'm a small, medium sized business, and I'm

just trying to get get people fired up and jack up about the

idea of providing amazing customer service. So there, you

know, what are some simple things that we can do pretty

quickly that don't cost a lot, that are going to improve my

customers experience immediately?

All right, give everybody an index card and tell

them that at the end of the week you want them to write down an

example when they've created a great service experience, either

for a customer, or their internal customer, someone they

work with. Okay, then you compile these cards. Somebody

gets them, they compile them, they look through them, they

pick the best of the best, and they share these. And what you

also try and do, and I use that word, operationalized a little

earlier. Operationalize some of these good, positive

experiences. Why can't they be happening all the time? Now the

next thing I want them to do is I want them not to just do this

once. I want them to do it once a week for like, the next six

weeks. And what happens is, at the end of the week, people are

going, Okay, what should I write about? And after about week

three or four, they're going, Oh, this is a great one. This is

what I want to write about. So instead of reflecting back,

they're caught in the moment of giving that great service to

experience.

Oh, I love that. Shep, thanks for joining the show, my

friend.

Thank you, great to be here. Hope we do it again

soon.