The Action Catalyst
REMASTERED: Magic or Misery, with Shep Hyken (Customer Service, Business, Management, Leadership)
Tue, 14 Jan 2025
Shep Hyken, Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations, customer service and experience expert, author, and speaker, explains the true meaning of being "helpful", why it takes one to say yes, but two to say no, finding moments of magic, misery, and mediocrity, and the handy index card trick for your staff.
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.
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This man is incredible. His name is Shep Hyken. He's the chief amazement officer at Shepard 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 bestselling author and Hall of Fame speaker. Shep, 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 I was looking for a company that's a rock star, but not recognized as a rock star. And that was Ace Hardware. Businessweek recognized the top 25 customer service brands. Ritz was rated number 12.
And I loved Ritz-Carlton, one of my favorite, favorite hotel chains. Guess what? Ace 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 4,600 stores owned by 3,000 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. And the Home Depot or Lowe's or Menards go up right next to them. And the 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? Or do they need help with something? Or do they need support? Or do they want value? And by the way, you can get a hybrid.
You can't always get the lowest price and the best service. In the case of a target, 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 whole thing. Plus, they're staffed extremely well.
You're not going to have to go walking around the aisles looking for someone to help you. That's important. So I think convenience, staffed properly without having to wait a long time, knowledgeable people, all that goes toward helpfulness.
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.
When's the last time you asked for something and to get approval, someone said, hold on, I have to check with my manager. So, OK, 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 OK.
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 in a while you'll 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 string the moments of magic along and they're consistent, that puts you in what I call the zone of amazement. I love these 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, I'm a man and I want to buy my wife something. The guy will take me upstairs to 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. Yeah. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. It's 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, I'm the manager, how do I get the people on the front line to care about this? Right. Well, first of all, recognize that if they aren't willing to care personally, 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 it's 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, OK, 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 people fired up and jacked up about the idea of providing amazing customer service.
What are some simple things that we can do pretty quickly that don't cost a lot that are going to improve my customer's 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 of 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 operationalize 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 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.
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