Author Archives: Shep Hyken

About Shep Hyken

Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, keynote speaker, and New York Times, bestselling business author. For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs, go to www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

5 Ways IKEA Creates A Luxury Experience

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How IKEA Creates A Luxury Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

IKEA is a retailer known for furniture that the customers have to assemble. Its showrooms feature ongoing displays of its products, and delicious Swedish meatballs are sold in restaurants located inside its stores. It is also known as affordable, which may make you ask, “How can an affordable brand, like IKEA, create a luxury experience?”

That’s the question answered by Neen James, the author of Exceptional Experiences: Five Luxury Levers to Elevate Every Aspect of Your Business, who uses IKEA as a case study to prove that even brands known for low prices can create a luxury experience.

In my interview with James on Amazing Business Radio, she makes it clear that luxury experiences aren’t always about high-end and high cost, although they can be. An evening at the Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons will cost significantly more than an inexpensive roadside hotel, and the experience will be distinctly different. However, the experience at an inexpensive hotel can be elevated by triggering the five luxury levels in James’ book.

Luxury Is About Experiences, Not Things

This is the title of Part One in the book and makes the case for my hotel comment above. James says, “You don’t have to have a luxury product to provide a luxury level of service.” Luxury experiences don’t have to be costly or limited to fancy products like expensive handbags or high-end cars (or fancy hotels). Even a small business or budget hotel can deliver what feels like a luxury experience if it focuses on how it treats its customers. It’s more important to make people feel special, valued and appreciated than to give them material things. True luxury comes from the way you make someone feel, not just from the price tag.

The Five Characteristics of Luxury

According to James, “In the Luxury Mindset Study, we learned that luxury is defined with five words: high quality, long lasting, authentic, unique and indulgent. These characteristics apply whether you’re at Motel 6 or the Ritz, except maybe the word indulgent.” These words can shape the way your company or team interacts with customers, making every experience feel exceptional. By focusing on these qualities, even basic products and services can seem luxurious. It’s the way you make customers feel. James says, “Always look for ways to make your service authentic and memorable.”

The Five Luxury Levers

James talks about “champagne moments,” about elevating the ordinary and making it extraordinary. Any company can have these types of moments. It’s about elevating these moments and creating a human connection. The experience elevation model has five levers:

Entice: Create the experience that will captivate your customers’ interest and make them pay attention to you.
Invite: Communicate your offerings in a way that makes them feel exclusive and desirable. Make your customers feel special by making them feel as if they have been “invited” to do business with you. When possible, make it feel personal.
Excite: The experience should be exciting enough to be share-worthy. If your customers are talking about you, you’ve triggered this level. James writes in her book, “When clients think of your brand, you want them to ask, with awe and wonder, ‘What else will they do?’”
Delight: This lever comes from making a customer feel unique and special, offering excellent customer service and anticipating your customers’ needs.
Ignite: This is where you create advocates. The experience is so good that customers want to tell others about you.

How IKEA Creates a Luxury Experience

While not traditionally associated with luxury, according to James, IKEA hits a number of luxury triggers. First, they engage all five senses—even taste and smell, thanks to the brand’s delicious Swedish meatballs. The in-store experience allows customers to touch fabrics and see how easy products are to assemble. Its use of “sensory elements” (touch, taste, smell, sight) makes shopping at an IKEA store feel special and memorable.

Additionally, there is the incredible experience of the IKEA effect, in which customers feel a sense of accomplishment when they assemble furniture themselves, creating more satisfaction than simply receiving pre-assembled furniture.

And to emphasize that luxury is about experiences, not things, James points out that luxury is not about the price tag. IKEA offers the luxury experience in a way that makes customers feel special, not just through expensive items. In short, it’s all about the experience.

Final Words

Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the five characteristics of luxury or James’ luxury levers. They may seem like common sense, but common sense isn’t so common.

Dig into these ideas and strategize around how you can activate them throughout your customers’ journey. Ask yourself questions like, “What do we do to entice our customers?” “Do we make customers feel special, like they are invited guests?,” or “Are we creating the type of experience that our customers would want to tell others about?”

Questions like these will get you into a luxury mindset. Remember, the luxury experience is tied to the customer experience more than it is to fancy and expensive products.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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10 Reasons Why Customers Hate Calling You for Help 

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10 Reasons Why Customers Hate Calling You for Help 

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

This article answers the question: Why do customers hate calling customer support, and how can companies fix the experience?

I have good news. Calling customer support is getting better, even if you don’t notice it yet. Part of the reason you might think it’s not improving is that past bad experiences have left such a “metaphorical scar” that you avoid making the call for many reasons I’ll share in just a moment.

Yes, we may still encounter friction when calling for help or support, but with the latest technology, which includes AI-infused chatbots that either talk or message with you, the experience of getting help is improving. And even without technology, it’s still possible to create an experience that makes customers love you. You just have to know what they hate about calling for support and eliminate those from the experience. So, with that in mind, here are the ten reasons customers hate calling for help:

Making It Hard to Find Contact Information: This is where customer support starts. Some companies seem to bury contact information, making it hard for customers to find, which creates or adds frustration.
Long Hold Times: Nobody wants to wait. At best, keep hold times short. At worst, which isn’t so bad, let customers know how long the wait will be and give them the option of a call-back.
Making Customers Repeat Themselves: The more times you make customers retell their story, the more frustrated they become.
Being Transferred: The goal should be to not transfer a customer, but if you do, make sure it’s only once. And multiple transfers most likely mean customers are repeating themselves multiple times.
Agents Who Aren’t Empowered: If you hire good people and train them well, they should be empowered to take care of customers, eliminating the need for customers to repeat themselves and be transferred multiple times.

Agent Representative Customer Service Shep Hyken Cartoon

Inconvenient Hours of Operation: Some companies make support available only during normal working hours. This is fine if your customers are unemployed, but for everyone else, be accessible. And with AI being able to handle many issues, some questions and problems can be answered 24/7.
Bad Phone Trees or IVRs (Interactive Voice Response): If you have called for support and none of the choices offered are what you need, or you find yourself trapped in a loop of options, you’ve experienced this. By the way, our annual customer support research found that 76% of customers have been caught in an automated menu system and screamed “Agent” or “Representative” into the phone, before eventually hanging up.
Clunky and Ineffective Self-Service: Customer support of any type should be easy. Self-service systems should be intuitive and easy to navigate.
Telling Customers, “You Have to ____ ”: It’s okay to tell a customer what to do, just phrase it in a way that’s helpful, not forceful. And if you can do it for them, even better.
Customer Anxiety: This may be the most important one! There’s a reason that 34% of customers we surveyed said they would rather go to the dentist than call customer support. It’s because they’ve experienced one or more of the above reasons that customers hate calling customer support. This anxiety causes customers to be frustrated even before they decide to reach out to you.

Yes, there are other reasons that frustrate and anger customers when they have to call customer support. A short summary of the above is to be easy, eliminate friction, respect customers’ time, and give them the right answer the first time. This will make customers love you and say, “I’ll be back!”

Image Credit: Shep Hyken, Unsplash

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CX Leadership Insights from Disney, Ritz-Carlton and MasterCard

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CX Leadership Insights from Disney, Ritz-Carlton and MasterCard

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

If you look up the definition of customer experience in the dictionary, you might find a picture of Lance Gruner, whose leadership, customer service and CX training come from his stints at some of the most recognizable brands on the planet, including Disney, The Ritz-Carlton and MasterCard, where he served as executive vice president of global customer care in his most recent role.

After retiring from MasterCard earlier this year, Gruner decided to share the lessons he learned from a lifetime of leadership and customer experience in his new book, Ten Things They Hate About You: A CX Playbook for Leaders. If keeping customers is important to you — and you know it is — then this is the next book you want to read.

I interviewed Gruner on an episode of Amazing Business Radio, and we talked about some of the most valuable lessons he learned from working for those iconic brands.

1. Walk the Property

Gruner says, “Today, a lot of leaders make decisions from the boardroom, but they rarely experience their customers’ friction points firsthand.” He learned the importance of “walking the property” from his days at the Ritz-Carlton, where he would walk through the hotel daily and notice what guests were seeing, smelling and experiencing. This “walk the property” ritual applies to any type of business. It simply means stepping outside of the office to buy and use the products you sell, just as a customer would. Or calling the company to ask a question during busy times. Observe the experience from the customer’s point of view. To make good decisions, you must experience what customers experience.

2. Pick Up the Trash

Employees pay attention to their leaders, and they notice everything. One of the most powerful leadership principles Gruner shared was how leaders teach everyone else how to act at work. We talked about his days at Disney and how Walt Disney used to walk the property. All cast members (Disney’s term for employees) paid close attention to Mr. Disney. They noticed whether he walked by a piece of trash or stooped down to pick it up and throw it away. Gruner says, “If a leader walks past a piece of paper on the ground and doesn’t pick it up, you condone that activity.” In other words, as a leader, you are giving permission for your employees to do the same. Picking up trash is a metaphor. Make sure the behaviors you model are the ones you want your team to repeat.

3. Pay Attention to Details

Small details make a big difference. It’s often the little things customers remember. Gruner insists that companies pay attention to every touchpoint, no matter how minor, to find opportunities to enhance the experience and earn a customer’s trust. Details aren’t just details. They can be the difference between losing a customer or creating a fan for life.

4. Automate Where You Can

One of my favorite questions to ask high-level execs in the CX world is whether or not AI will take away jobs. Every one of them has said, “No,” and Gruner agrees, saying, “AI is going to automate the simple things that you currently have your team doing, freeing up time for them to really take care of customers.” By removing the simple, mundane tasks, employees have more time to focus on complex issues and do what AI can’t do, which is old-fashioned human-to-human relationship building.

5. The Top Reason a Customer Hates You

Hate is a strong word. Using that word implies customers do not want to do business with you. To wrap up our interview, I asked for one lesson from his book, Ten Things They Hate About You, that we must know. His answer was quick, simple and something we already know (and have probably experienced). It’s having to deal with untrained and unempowered employees. When companies look to cut costs, one of the first areas they cut is training. Yes, taking people away from their normal productive responsibilities to train them is expensive, but what happens when you don’t? What happens when a customer interacts with an employee who hasn’t been properly trained or doesn’t have the knowledge to help the customer resolve their problem? We know what happens … the customer disappears.

Final Words

Customer experience isn’t built in a boardroom. It’s built where your customers live, buy and interact with your brand. Gruner’s insights remind us that the best leaders stay close to the front line, empower their people and never stop paying attention to the little things. That’s how you turn ordinary moments into extraordinary ones, and keep your customers saying, “I’ll be back!”

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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How to Hire Like the Richest Man in the World

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How to Hire Like the Richest Man in the World

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

This article answers the question: Is it better to hire employees for attitude or for skill, especially in customer service roles?

The old saying in business, when it comes to hiring people, is this:

Hire for attitude, train for skill.

I’ve shared ideas related to this quote in several articles and videos. So, why bring it up again? First, it’s a concept worth revisiting to remind us of this important truth, especially in the world of customer service and experience. Second, I recently heard a version of this that captures the essence and further emphasizes the importance of attitude versus skill.

As I write, the richest man in the world is Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, with an estimated net worth north of $500 billion. Whether you like the way he does business or not, we can’t ignore that he may have ideas worth paying attention to, and his take on this old quote is one of those ideas. The concept of hiring for attitude is driven home when he says, “Skills can be taught, but attitude changes require a brain transplant.”

Another man worth paying attention to is Jim Bush. In my book The Amazement Revolution, I interviewed Bush, who at the time was the executive VP of world service for American Express, responsible for customer support centers around the world. He shared that if he could hire someone with years of experience at a support center or working at the front desk of a hotel, he would choose the person with the hotel front desk experience.

Shep Hyken cartoon illustrating why you should hire for attitude and train for skill

Bush said, “We’re talking about human engagement, and that requires the ability to connect.” That’s why American Express began hiring people with hospitality experience. They had the attitude American Express was looking for. After being hired, they could be trained on the technical skills needed to work the computers at a contact center.

Now, before I go further, some of you might be thinking that certain jobs require specific skills, regardless of employees’ attitudes, and you are correct. A surgeon must graduate from medical school before operating. An electrician must learn the trade before wiring a home. Certain jobs require technical proficiency. However, if you hire someone with those skills who has the wrong attitude, they can harm your culture and potentially drive customers away. So, take this concept in the spirit of its meaning.

So, back to Musk’s line about attitude changes requiring a brain transplant. The comment is a bold way of saying that attitude isn’t something you can download like software. It’s hard-wired. People’s attitudes have been formed over their entire lives, from the time they were babies. Leaders who understand this focus on recruiting people who come to the job with the right mindset, with an attitude that fits the personality of the company. The takeaway is simple. Hire people who care. Then, teach them the specific skills they need to perform their job effectively. You can train for competence, but you can’t train for caring.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Giving Customers and Employees the Best Day Ever Experience

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Giving Customers and Employees the Best Day Ever Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Steve Spangler is a teacher, businessman and Emmy award-winning TV personality who has amassed more than 4.5 billion views across YouTube and TikTok. The secret to his success can be summed up in one word: engagement. And recently, he decided to write about it, authoring a book titled The Engagement Effect: Cultivating Experiences that Ignite Connection, Build Trust, and Inspire Action.

In our interview, Spangler shared ideas that will make you a better leader. His insights in the book offer practical strategies for transforming abstract engagement concepts into actionable approaches that work across industries. While he shared many ideas, the concept of The Best Day Ever Experience stands out. Almost everything in the books points to creating an engaging experience that gets employees to love where they work and engage more with customers, and customers to want to return and tell others about their experience.

Engagement Is About Creating Experiences, Not Just Transactions

As Spangler emphasizes, engagement isn’t a gimmick or technique. It’s a mindset. It starts with the belief that people want to connect, and it’s our job as leaders to create the kind of experiences that invite a connection. True engagement happens when you go beyond just selling a product or service to creating an experience that connects emotionally and intellectually with people. Whether in business, school or any setting, making your audience feel involved and valued turns a simple exchange into something memorable. When people feel engaged, they are more likely to become loyal and talk about their experiences with others.

The Best Day Ever Experience

Spangler discussed his early days as a teacher, when he decided to make Halloween special for his students. In his science class, he exploded a pumpkin, lit a gummy bear on fire and sent electricity through the students (safely, of course!).

The following day, the father of one of these students approached Spangler. The conversation started out sounding like an angry, concerned parent who asked, “Am I to understand that you detonated an explosion in front of a group of children?” He shared more details about what happened in that class, and the father wasn’t actually angry at all. He was elated!

It turns out his daughter, who never talked about school, had come home so excited that she talked about everything she experienced that day. On that Halloween night, instead of wanting to rush out and go trick-or-treating like most kids, his daughter made everyone stay at the dinner table until she shared every detail about the day. She summarized by saying, “Daddy, today was the best day ever.”

The Best Day Ever Experience is about emotional connection. It’s transformational, not just transactional. The principal at Spangler’s school complimented him by saying, “If it gets to the dinner table, you win.” That wasn’t just praise. It was a benchmark. In other words, if what you create for your customers or employees is so impactful that they metaphorically “bring it home,” talking about it excitedly to others, then you’ve created a transformational experience, one they will remember, want to experience again and share with others.

Chewy.com Creates Best Day Ever Experiences

Spangler shared a business example using Chewy.com as the case study. Chewy sells pet supplies online, and there are plenty of similar stories about how Chewy creates intense loyalty with its customers.

In the early years of Chewy.com, a customer called to cancel his monthly dog food delivery subscription. Unfortunately, his dog passed away. That month’s delivery showed up, reminding him that he had to make the call. He was very emotional as he shared his story. The Chewy.com employee expressed empathy and sympathy. She informed him that the subscription was canceled, and he would receive a refund for the most recent delivery. She asked that he give the dog food to a neighbor or donate it to an animal shelter. That would have been a friendly end to the story, but there’s more.

Two days later, there was a knock at the customer’s door. A local florist delivered a plant with a note from Chewy.com about how they wanted him to know that his friends at the company were thinking about him and how hard it is to lose a “best friend.” Spangler summarizes by saying, “A sad and touching moment, yes, but also a Best Day Ever moment.”

Final Words

All leaders are experience designers, whether they realize it or not. Every meeting, message and moment is an opportunity to create an experience that is memorable (or forgettable). Spangler’s book serves as a roadmap for leaders who are ready to transform their approach from transactional to transformational. The way you treat employees and customers shapes their memories and creates loyalty. Focus on how you present ideas and products, not just what you offer. The question every leader should ask is, “Are we creating experiences so memorable that our employees and customers rush to tell others about them?”

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Making Every Customer Feel Special

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Making Every Customer Feel Special

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

This article answers the question: What is the difference between personalization and individualization, and why does it matter to the customer experience?

The concept of personalization is gaining increased attention. My annual customer experience research found that nearly eight out of 10 customers (79%) in the U.S. feel a personalized experience is important. So, what is a personalized experience?

It’s simple. Using a customer’s data and information (with their permission, of course), which could include preferences they’ve shared with you, past behaviors, purchasing patterns, notes from interactions they’ve had with you and more, allows you to tailor interactions, offers, and communications to the customer based on what you know about them.

It also allows you to group customers into segments. For example, if you sell shoes and a customer has bought three pairs of golf shoes in the past year, you wouldn’t recommend running shoes. However, you might inform the customer, and customers like him, about the latest golf shoe technology and suggest other golf-related products. This personalized experience results in customers feeling recognized and valued, rather than just being treated as a generic transaction.

Now, there’s a higher level of personalization, and that’s individualization. Personalization makes customers feel recognized. Individualization makes them feel truly understood. This next level of personalization comes from the amount of data that can be collected from an individual customer, combined with AI’s ability to interpret that data with uncanny accuracy. The best way to describe the difference is that it’s no longer about customer segmentation. It’s about providing truly individualized experiences tailored to each customer.

Why is this important to the customer experience? If you thought personalization made a customer feel recognized and valued, this is that on steroids.

Old-fashioned individualization before AI was the amazing salesperson who always recognized you, remembered what you bought, knew what you liked, could predict what you’d want to buy and might even call you to let you know that your favorite brand had something new that you’d love.

Modern individualization is when you log into Amazon and the website welcomes you, not just promoting the brand of toothpaste you’ve bought in the past, but also reminding you that you may be running low on toothpaste.

And even though AI is making individualization easier, you don’t need expensive AI software to do this. You can start by paying attention. One of my clients is a master at sending out birthday cards with hand-written, individualized messages. And when you call him, he remembers details about you. It’s not magic or AI software. It’s just asking questions, listening to the answers and taking notes so he remembers the details the next time he talks to the client.

The goal is to make every customer feel like they are your only customer. Whether you’re using AI or just old-fashioned attention to detail, the result is the same. Done the right way, customers feel valued and appreciated and respond by saying, “I’ll be back!”

Image Credit: Pixabay, Shep Hyken

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Leadership Nightmares That Drive Employees Away

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Bosses Emailing at Midnight and Other Tales of Woe

Leadership Nightmares That Drive Employees Away

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

“People don’t leave jobs. They leave bad bosses.”

There is truth to this unattributable quote. (I searched Google and ChatGPT, and neither could give me the definitive origin of this quote.) Validation comes from numerous articles and studies that claim a large percentage of employees quit their jobs because of bad managers.

A Harvard Business Review article, Quiet Quitting Is About Bad Bosses, Not Bad Employees by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folman, explains that employees don’t have to outright leave their jobs to “quietly quit,” or do only the bare minimum needed to keep their jobs. According to Gallup’s 2024 State of Global Workplace Report, only 23% of employees are engaged, 62% are “not engaged” and 15% are “actively disengaged.” And 70% of the variance in team engagement is due to the manager.

When you look at the best companies to buy from, you often find they are also listed on Glassdoor.com as the best companies to work for. That direct correlation isn’t a coincidence. In my customer service and customer experience (CX) work, I recognized decades ago that what’s happening on the inside of an organization is felt by customers on the outside. The employee experience is as important, if not more so, than the customer experience, and the boss can “make or break” that experience.

Meet Mita Mallick, who once had a boss who would only communicate with her via email between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. That seemed to be the only time the boss was available. Trying to meet with her boss during normal business hours was an exercise in futility. The message was clear: “I don’t have time for you.” And as a junior employee, Mallick thought she had to respond in real time to keep her job.

That experience, along with others, is why Mallick, who is now an author and speaker on a mission to “fix what’s broken in the workplace,” wrote the book, The Devil Emails at Midnight: What Good Leaders Can Learn from Bad Bosses. This book shares the details of 13 bosses, herself included, who demonstrate what not to do.

I interviewed Mallick for an episode of Amazing Business Radio to learn about some of these bad bosses, in hopes that anyone who falls into that category of leadership might learn a lesson and make their employees’ experience better. Here are descriptions of just a few of the bad bosses Mallick talked about in our interview, along with some of my commentary:

The Boss Who Never Had Time for Employees—Except at Midnight

As mentioned, this is where the book begins, with a boss who didn’t respect employees’ time or explain that just because she worked at midnight, she didn’t expect her employees to do the same. A simple explanation that immediate responses to her late-night emails weren’t necessary would have been easy, but unfortunately for Mallick, that was not the case. Everything seemed urgent, and Mallick emphasized this by saying, “When we treat everything as urgent, nothing is urgent.”

The Lesson: Leadership means making time for your team. Respect employees’ time and boundaries.

The Boss Who Wouldn’t Call an Employee by Name

Mallick shared that a boss didn’t want to call her by her full first name, Madhumita. Because he struggled to pronounce her full name, he renamed her Mohammed. One day, she worked up the courage to say, “You can call me Mita,” but the insensitive boss smiled and said, “Oh, Mohammed is funny. Everyone loves it. Don’t be so sensitive!” No doubt an HR issue by today’s standards, this boss showed a lack of respect for a good employee.

The Lesson: Calling people by their correct names is a basic courtesy and sign of respect. But there’s more to this. It’s not just about a name. Recognizing something sensitive and/or important to an employee should be acknowledged and accepted. Teasing about it will, at a minimum, put distance between the boss and employee.

The Boss Who Was Filled with Toxic Positivity

An upbeat and energetic boss is great, but ignoring real problems and acting like everything is fine is known as toxic positivity. If the facts indicate that something isn’t possible, then pretending it is can set a team up for failure and disappointment. Cheerleading only helps so much. If the boss hypes everyone up to believe something impossible can be done, and then the team fails, it can be demoralizing to the team.

The Lesson: Leaders should inspire, but not at the cost of reality.

Final Words

The worst behaviors in any workplace become part of its culture if they are allowed to continue. Whether it’s disrespect, slacking off or bullying, what leaders let slide becomes the norm. Look at yourself in the mirror and ask, “Am I one of these people causing the problem?” Creating a positive environment means taking action when problems arise, not ignoring them. A healthy workplace looks out for everyone, not just the loudest or most powerful voices.

The Final Lesson: Culture is defined by what is tolerated and demonstrated by the boss.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image Credit: Unsplash, Shep Hyken

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Customers Don’t Care About Your Profit

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They Care About Your Service

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Recently, I heard from one of our subscribers, a sales and finance consultant at a luxury automobile dealership. He shared a story about how a customer was almost mistreated.

In the world of auto sales, some salespeople are 100% commission-based, and when they sell a vehicle at a discounted price, there is little to no profit, resulting in a very small commission. This is important, as sometimes these low-commission sales cause employees to treat customers differently than they would for a high-commission sale.

Customers expect to be treated the same regardless of how much or little they pay for their vehicle. Furthermore, they don’t realize, nor do they care, how much of a sales commission is paid to the employee.

Shep Hyken Customer Service vs Profit Cartoon

That brings us to the customer who bought a two-year-old luxury sports car. The first time it rained, she realized the windshield wipers needed to be replaced. The customer called her salesperson, who explained that he was happy to replace the blades. He went to his sales manager to ask how to handle the replacement and was told to charge her the cost of the blades or to tell her to buy them at Walmart for less than the dealership’s cost and bring them in to have them replaced.

The salesperson was shocked and reminded his sales manager that they were selling a premium brand. Eventually, the manager agreed, but the experience reminded him that profit, or the lack thereof, dictated the level of service the dealership would offer.

Three Customer-First Lessons

With that in mind, let’s use the story as a learning experience for all businesses. Here are three lessons from the story:

The Customer Doesn’t Care about Your Profit: Every customer deserves respect and a consistent experience, whether it’s $20 transaction or a $200,000 one. Profit per interaction shouldn’t determine the level of care.
Know the Lifetime Value of the Customer: The wiper blades may have been a $20 problem, but how the customer was treated for the problem could determine the future sale of a high-end luxury automobile worth thousands of times more. Knowing the average value of a customer will help employees make more informed, customer-focused decisions. Small gestures today can protect long-term loyalty and repeat business.
Consistency Builds Trust: Luxury brands thrive on consistent treatment, but the principle applies to all types of businesses. Today’s customers demand a good customer experience. Train and empower employees to deliver a consistent standard of service, every time, for every customer.

In the end, customers remember the experience, not your profit margins. Get the small things right, and the money follows as you earn their trust, confidence, and loyalty.

Image Credit: Unsplash, Shep Hyken

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Are Happy Customers or Employees More Valuable?

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GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Do happy employees make happy customers, or is it the other way around? Do happy customers make employees happy?

I’ve written in many articles and books that a focus on the employee experience will improve the customer experience. The logic makes sense. If you treat employees well, they will be more engaged with their customers and fellow employees. My mantra has been:

What happens on the inside of an organization is felt on the outside by customers.

I had the chance to interview Sean Crichton-Browne, co-author of The Human Culture Imperative, for an episode of Amazing Business Radio. He challenges the concept, and in his book, he discusses how happy customers actually create happier and more engaged employees.

Crichton-Browne’s insights stem from his years of sales experience. He said, “I was happy when my customers were happy. Because at the end of the day, when I received that phone call from a disgruntled customer, I became exceptionally unhappy.” In other words, the emotional climate of a customer’s happiness (or unhappiness) had a direct impact on employee satisfaction.

Crichton-Browne’s “outside-in” approach flips the traditional “happy employees equals happy customers” approach and asks us to start with the end in mind. He argues that when customers are happy, employees will take greater pride in their work, stay longer and be more engaged.

While this idea makes sense, I’m still of the “happy employees first” mentality. No matter how great your product is, if you don’t support it with great service, the customer eventually moves on to the competition. That great service is the result of great employees positively engaging with their customers. You don’t want to make employees who control the customer experience unhappy. Again, what’s happening on the inside of the organization is felt on the outside by customers.

We did find some middle ground. There is no doubt that happy customers elevate employee morale. It’s like a continuous loop. Employees feel good when customers are happy, and customers feel good when employees are happy. Crichton-Browne says, “One cannot exist successfully without the other.”

So, what’s the takeaway from our conversation? First, don’t get caught up in the chicken-or-the-egg debate. The truth is that employee happiness and customer happiness feed off each other. Customers feel good when employees are engaged, and employees feel good when customers are happy. One can’t exist without the other, and together they create the kind of momentum that makes both employees and customers say, “I’ll be back!”

Image Credit: Gemini

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Investments That Make Your Company More Productive, Efficient and Customer-Friendly

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Investments That Make Your Company More Productive, Efficient and Customer-Friendly

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

What company doesn’t want to be more productive, efficient, and customer-friendly? (That’s a rhetorical question.) Isn’t this what every leader wants? Yet recent survey findings from Call Centre Helper an inconsistency in how organizations pursue these goals. This inconsistency can make or break their customer experience strategy. And if they fail their customers, their company may fail, as well.

The Call Centre Helper numbers tell the story. When asked where organizations can get maximum value for money while improving customer experience, a staggering 40% pointed to self-service solutions. Personalization came in a distant second at 18%, followed by productivity tools (12%). And despite years of improvement in AI, chatbots only received 8% of the vote.

In my own 2025 customer service and CX research of over 1,000 U.S. consumers, 68% still prefer the phone as their first choice for customer support, followed by online chat with a live agent at 55%. This creates what I call the customer experience investment paradox, where companies are pushing their investment into self-service tools while customers continue to value human-to-human interactions with live support agents.

The Self-Service Revolution is Real

In spite of the preference for phone support, the digital self-service revolution is real and becoming more important to companies. While the phone is still king, my research found that 34% of customers stopped doing business with a company because self-service options weren’t offered. That’s a third of your potential customers. Even if they prefer the phone, they want the option of doing it themselves.

There are some digital rockstar brands like Amazon and Uber, which have trained customers to expect instant and easy experiences. When customers can order groceries, stream entertainment, or hail a ride with a few taps of their mobile screen, they naturally expect similar experiences with every brand they encounter.

This makes the case for self-service, in spite of the customer’s desire to make a phone call. When the right solution is provided, the benefits to the company are big in the form of reduced operational costs and an improved customer experience. When executed well, self-service allows customers to resolve simple issues instantly, freeing up human agents to take on complex problems that require expertise and empathy.

That said, I regularly caution my clients that going “all in” on self-service without considering the larger customer journey could be a mistake. The keywords to consider are “when executed well.” Poorly implemented self-service creates frustrated customers who eventually demand human assistance anyway, often at a higher cost to resolve, and not to mention the bad will caused by the frustration.

Personalization: A Competitive Differentiator

The 18% investment in improving personalization shows that companies are understanding the importance of creating the personalized experience. My research reveals that 79% of consumers consider a personalized experience to be important.

Consumers are still being bombarded with generic messages from the companies they do business with that often leave them asking, “Why is this company sending this to me?” The result is customers disengage and often move on. As personalization technology improves (dramatically), analytics on a customer’s buying habits, frequency, past products purchased, and more can be incorporated into messaging and customer support experiences that have customers saying, “This company knows me.”

Smart companies use customer data to do more than personalize marketing messages and improve customer support. The data allows companies to anticipate needs, make recommendations for other products and services, and improve the overall customer experience.

The Relevance of the Human Connection

Despite a focus on digital investment, the human-to-human connection cannot be ignored. The fact that 68% of customers still prefer the phone confirms that self-service and chatbots may not be enough. Customers still want to talk to a live human being, especially about complex problems or major complaints.

However, the technology is getting better, and customers are becoming more confident with self-service solutions, which include chatbots. Also, as Gen Zs and younger Millennials become financially secure, they become a major force in the economy. They are the ones becoming I predict the 68% number will go lower for two reasons:

And age makes a difference, or does it? While my research finds that 82% of Baby Boomers prefer the phone, you can’t ignore that 52% of Gen Zs prefer it as well. At the same time, I predict that 68% of customers preferring the phone will go down for at least two reasons. First, the technology is getting better, and customers are becoming more confident with self-service solutions, which include improved chatbots. Second, Gen Zs and younger Millennials, who are more comfortable with technology, are becoming financially secure. The result is that they will be a major force in the economy.

Productivity and Efficiency

The 12% investment into productivity is about efficiency and optimizing the workforce. Some companies believe that being more efficient means replacing the workforce with technology. That’s a dangerous move for reasons and information already shared in this article. However, rather than saving money by eliminating employees, companies can make employees more productive. Imagine technology that saves employees 20% of their workday by eliminating menial tasks or answering basic questions that AI and chatbots can respond to. In turn, they use that time to focus on more important issues and tasks.

Many companies view chatbots as an investment in productivity, however according to the Call Centre Helper findings, companies are investing less than 8% in this powerful tool. My take on this is that companies have been let down by AI-fueled chatbots that make mistakes and hallucinate. That’s yesterday’s chatbot technology. Today, chatbots are far better than they were just a year ago. And if you’re worried about chatbots giving bad information to customers, don’t think that customers haven’t had the same experience with human support.

Final Words

The most successful companies I work with aren’t choosing between digital efficiency and human connection. They’re creating integrated experiences that deliver both. They use self-service for simple, routine interactions while ensuring a seamless hand-off to a human when needed. They leverage personalization to anticipate customers’ needs and build relationships. They invest in tools that enhance rather than replace human connection, achieving what every leader wants: a business that’s more productive, efficient, and loved by its customers.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image Credit: Gemini

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