James Nathan  0:54  Hello, and welcome to The Only One Business Show with me your host James Nathan, and this week on the show I’ve got amazing guest. He’s the Chief Amazement Officer at Shep Presentations, an award winning keynote speaker and New York Times and Wall Street Journal best selling business author. As one of the leading experts in the field of customer service and experience, he works with customers and companies who want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees. All the way from St. Louis, Missouri. Please welcome Shep Hyken. Shep, how are you?

Shep Hyken  1:26  Hey, it’s so great to be here. Thanks for having me.

James Nathan  1:30  Oh, it’s an absolute pleasure. And I hope I haven’t got you up too early. Because I know it’s a total difference in time at the moment.

Shep Hyken  1:36  I know it’s in the evening for you. And it’s middle of the morning for me, so definitely not up too early.

James Nathan  1:42  Oh, good. They’re all good. And so and you’ve been traveling a lot recently…. I’ve been keeping a track of you online. You seem to get away from your office there a lot.

Shep Hyken 1:53  Yeah, I’m gone about every week. A few international trips this year. Actually, I was over near you. I was in Brisbane earlier this year. Let’s see where else I go. Malaysia. I went to South America. Canada, that’s not really too far out of the way.

James Nathan  2:12  Well, it’s another country. I mean, I’m living in Oxfordshire these days, but I came from Perth originally Shep. So yeah, you know, I think it’s in Australia is about as far from Brisbane as you could get. On a map it doesn’t look too bad.

Shep Hyken  2:24  And I got a call from a company in Perth, I’ve been working with them for the last few years. And they said, Shep, we want to hire you to come and speak to our, actually they call them members. They’re not customers, which I love that concept. And I go great, great. I’m going to finally get to Perth. No, we’re going to do the meeting in China, I go okay…..

James Nathan  2:44  Well, still….

Shep Hyken  2:45  Yeah. But I get to go to Paris this month. And plus, you know, I go to all over the US. I’ll be in San Francisco, Austin, Texas. I’ll be in a bunch of different places in the next few weeks.

James Nathan  2:58  Picking up a few air miles on the way I guess as well.

Shep Hyken  3:01  Yeah

James Nathan  3:01  Shep, I’ve been loving the Convenience Revolution book, I’ve just finished it. In fact, it’s my second read through, the first time I just listened the second time where I started to really pay even more attention. What is it about convenience and customer experience that’s so important?

Shep Hyken  3:19  What’s really interesting, we’re starting to understand by looking at all the stats and facts and research that’s coming out that companies are trying to do their best to provide great customer service. And let’s just make a statement that’s real obvious. But people don’t recognize it until they hear it. Our customers are smarter than ever before. They know what good customer service is. They know what it feels like what it looks like, when they experience they know it. And they’re experiencing it from Rockstar companies that are providing it and guess what’s happening? Because so many companies are promising great service. And by the way, many are delivering a level of service that may be better than what they used to have, they aren’t necessarily hitting the bar, these great companies. The point is our customers recognize a great service experience and don’t compare you to a direct competitor anymore. They’re comparing you to the best service they’ve ever had. And I want to set that stage. Because from that point, okay, we provide great service good, we provide a good product, good, one plus one, at that point does not equal two, its bigger. How do you get that to the next level, you make it easier, you provide less friction, you find ways to just make it a better experience by making it more convenient for the customer.

James Nathan  4:38  Because we all we all love things when it’s just easy for us, don’t we? I know someone was was talking recently about value on this show. And they were telling me you know, the old definition, I guess is, you know value is more what you get more than what you pay for. But actually it’s not. It’s about ease of use as well, isn’t it?

Shep Hyken  4:57  Yeah. and ease of use is huge. So are people willing to pay more for convenience? They all the indicators are yes. Multiple research studies have gone out there and said that we’re actually starting to conduct one on our own to make sure that you know, the data is relevant to the audience that I’m interested in talking to but I want you to imagine this. You’re sitting in your hotel room. It’s 10 o’clock at night, just outside your hotel room, maybe 20 feet away, is a machine that sells soda, water, drinks, whatever, for about $3 a drink, that’s US dollars. Okay, in your room, you have a mini bar that the hotel provides for you. And if all you do is pick up the soda, they’re going to charge you for it right? And the price of that soda is $9 or $10 or three times more than the one outside. Okay, that’s just 20 feet away. Where do you go to get your soda? I know where I go. Okay. But most people….

James Nathan  5:59  I go across the road because I’m…..

Shep Hyken  6:03  the place that sells and even less expensive than the machine. Right? Yeah.

James Nathan  6:06  Well, as long as you dressed, I guess. Yeah.

Shep Hyken  6:08  Right, Right. But here’s what happens. Every morning, I look at the hotel staff, when I know that there’s a machine. And there’s the minibar and I’m watching the staff restocking the mini bar, and nobody is touching that machine. So I mean, people do use the machine, it’s just not as frequent. And think about it. Now that’s that’s the definition of convenience and where price becomes less relevant. You’ve heard of the convenience store, it’s pretty obvious the 7 Eleven, they have 65,000 around the world. There’s many different versions of a 7 Eleven convenience store that is out there. But typically, when you go into a 7 Eleven, not as biggest selection, price a little bit more. But guess what, everyday people are driving in there, simply because it’s more convenient. That’s why they call it a convenience store.

James Nathan  6:57  Yeah, and they know it done that they know it’s going to cost them more.

Shep Hyken  7:00  Yeah. But then there’s other businesses like, I don’t know how much you buy from Amazon. But Amazon is the most convenient of all businesses to do business with. And yet, they also pride themselves on having very competitive if not even the lowest price. So that’s an unbelievable combination. But they’re able to give you these conveniences because they don’t have a brick and mortar store. They don’t have the same level of cost that others do. So they pass that savings on. And by the way, Jeff Bezos, who, you know, the guy that started this whole Amazon thing, he figured out, he’d rather make a tiny profit on a whole lot of customers than a bigger profit on a lower number of customers. And as a result, he piles all that money back into giving people a better experience and keeping prices low.

James Nathan  7:52  You know, you mentioned whether I use Amazon or not, I think they’re going to put a special van in just for my home at the moment Shep, I tell you, it’s some and you know, and it’s not cheap Amazon. It’s a misconception. It’s a bit like eBay, you know, people think it’s easy, it’s cheap. It’s not cheap. It’s just easy, and it’s convenient. And you click it, it’s there for some stuff, even you know, the same day. And that’s amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Shep Hyken  8:15  And you know, what Amazon does is in many cases, when you see an item that you like, and I’ll tell you, there’s an item that you can buy through the third party, I guess they call it the third party market, they may fulfill for them. Or they may just be marketing through the Amazon website. And they’ll tell you, it can be bought less expensive. If you want to go outside of Amazon’s guarantee and their suggestions. And people say no, I like the guarantee. You know what happened the other day, I bought a refrigerator from Amazon. That’s a pretty big purchase. It was a mini fridge, not a huge fridge. It was from my office, okay. And it came damaged. And we called up. And by the way, I didn’t even have to open it, take it out of the box. You can see as soon as we open it, you could see the top of it had been dropped, it was bent. It was still usable. But I thought you know what, for a few hundred dollars, I would like to let them know, maybe they’ll send me a new and I could ship this one back. I haven’t even taken out of the box. They were they said can you send us a picture, snapped a picture on the phone. They told me what email to send it to. Four minutes later, and we’re back on the phone with them. They thanked me, they apologized over and over. They took care of it. It was so easy. And you know, when you know they’re going to stand behind whatever it is that that they sell. I think any company needs to do that. And we can take a lot of lessons from Amazon. As matter of fact, the book you mentioned, The Convenience Revolution, while I showcase guests, there’s 30 different companies that we use as examples. There is one master case study. So it’s actually 31 companies. There’s one master case study and Amazon is it. It represents all the six convenience principles, by the way many companies do. But since most people know who Amazon is and have done business with Amazon, it was a real easy example to use.

James Nathan  10:07  And you don’t need to find them do you? You can’t find them, in fact, because they make it easier for you because they insist on phoning you, you just click a button. There you are. And it does. In fact I we did have a problem this week was with something was was actually the Fire Tablet that my daughter uses. And as soon as I press the button, my phone rang. It was almost like it was connected to my phone

Shep Hyken  10:28  They were waiting for you.

James Nathan  10:29  Yeah, man. I just…. people whinge a lot about Amazon about what it’s done to the high street. I don’t think it’s done a thing to the high street. I think the high streets done a lot to the high street, you know, actually theres huge points we can learn.

Shep Hyken  10:41  Yeah, I didn’t you write about that? Not that long ago?

James Nathan  10:44  I talk about it a lot.

Shep Hyken  10:46  Yeah, yeah. So here’s the other thing with Amazon. The damage that was done was in shipping. They aren’t responsible for shipping. The actually, to me, they’re responsible for shipping. But you know who created the problem was whoever it was, it could have been the US Postal Service. It could have been FedEx, it could have been UPS, any one of a number of different providers. So they did not say hey, once it leaves our warehouse, it’s not our problem. They own it. And I love that. So Jeff Bezos once said, why do we need a phone number? If we’re so good at delivering service? They should never, they the customer should never have to call us. And that’s fine until somebody else like the shipper creates a problem. And then like, I never got my item. And so who do I call? I call Amazon and Amazon says well it left, you know, and so they say…. I just love it. They take responsibility

James Nathan  11:43  Talk to me about internal customer service. Go know that something that you’re very keen on? Businesses are so big, most businesses will tell you their customer service. And most businesses will tell you, they’re all about what goes on outside the business, but surely inside the businesses equally important.

Shep Hyken  11:59  Well, and people say what should you focus on first, by the way, I believe strongly in delivering a level of internal service. And matter of fact, when you did the introduction, you said Shep works with companies that want to build loyal relationships with their customers and their employees. And all the research shows that if you focus on your employees, and try to give them a great experience, and treat them fair, and that doesn’t mean, you know that you have to roll over and give in on everything they asked for. But you have to be fair, you have to be approachable, you have to be, you know, when I say approachable leadership and management, they’ve got to create a culture within. And it’s really interesting that you’ll see that the best customer service companies that are rated, if you take a look at glassdoor.com and you go on you look at the same companies, you’ll find that they’re very highly rated as an employee experience as well. So which comes first, and I believe you first must decide I want to be very customer focused. So where’s my first step? It’s not the customer, it’s the employees, you don’t decide you want to be employee focus first, before the customer, you decide I want our customers to have a great experience. The first thing I have to do is go inside, what’s happening on the inside of an organization is felt on the outside by the customer.

James Nathan  13:14  Well, there’s there’s an old expression isn’t there that our customers treat our clients the way we treat them? I’m sorry, our employees treat our clients the way we treat them. Very, very true. But that goes right back to hiring, doesn’t it?

Shep Hyken  13:26  Yep. So you have obviously you have to hire right. And there’s a whole lot behind hiring right? You have to…… So I even think it goes before that, before hiring. By the way, your point about treating people I call this the Employee Golden Rule, you know, we’ve learned do unto others as you want done unto yourself. Well, the Employee Golden Rule is to do unto your employees as you want done unto the customer. And I might add even better, you become the role model. So before we can hire the right people, we must first decide, what do we want this culture to be? So leadership must define what that culture is. And once they have a clear picture of what that is, and what’s expected of their employees, then they can start hiring those people.

James Nathan  14:14  So what do you say to the smaller businesses? I understand, you know, in a big business, there’s the time and the resources to look at these things. But say, I start my shop, I’m focused, crazy focused on running the business. And then I start hiring employees, at what point does the leadership kick in? Or what point do I need to take note of that?

Shep Hyken  14:34  By the way, the day you started is a solo entrepreneur, okay. I don’t care if you’re a company that has 100,000 or more employees, or you’re the only employee getting ready to hire your first person, you need to define what you want that culture to look like. Now, maybe early on, because you’re an entrepreneur, and it’s just yourself, you haven’t done that exercise, I get it, that’s fine, you’re probably going to still try to find somebody that wants to give you the end result of what you’re trying to achieve. So I’m okay with that. But at a certain point, when you have two or three or four or five employees, you still need that vision. So I call it the service vision, which actually I refer to it as the mantra, because a mantra is a phrase, or, you know, if you think of the meditation, you know, where the person sitting there with their legs crossed, and they’re, you know, hands are on their arms, and they’re going ‘ummmm ummmm’. That’s a mantra, okay. And I remember when I was a kid learning, transcendental meditation, that was a hot craze back then, it still is very good. It’s very good for you to meditate. They gave you your own. I don’t know if they call it the mantra or not. But to me, a mantra is a statement, one sentence or less, that identifies the service vision that you want. And so you create that mantra, and we created ours. It is simply this: always be amazing. And I had an employee that work with me, wonderful woman, and she started showing up late for work every day. This was not like her. She was always the one that was early. Well, apparently, I didn’t realize she had moved from just a very short drive to an extremely long drive that was taking her almost an hour to get to work if not longer. She was trying to figure out how to get there early. But she was struggling. So she came in and sat down one day with me because I said, we got to talk about this habit that we need to break. And I said this showing up late, what is our mantra here at Shepherd Presentations. And she said, always be amazing. And I said, do you think showing up late four days in a row now is amazing behaviour? And she said no. I said, that’s right. It’s not. So we have a choice, you can be amazing, or go home. And the goal was to get her to understand that this habit needs to be broken. She goes, Well, how do you suggest I get here? I leave early every day. And I’m trying to figure out I leave a little bit earlier. I said, Well, that’s not what amazing people do. Amazing people go the opposite direction. You leave really, really early, you show up here a half an hour too soon, you going tomorrow, I don’t need to leave quite as early. And that’s how you figure it out rather than…. and she goes, ah, very good idea. Well, guess what happened the next day, she showed up a half an hour early. So, but there is an example of, you know, we hired somebody, they understand what our vision is. And when they weren’t hitting it, we could sit down and say look, is what you’re doing, you know, reflecting of our service vision, our mantra, three words always be amazing. The Ritz Carlton, my favourite one to talk about yet is nine words long:  were ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. That’s a….. then there’s a great one that’s a little bit longer. It’s a passion statement. I love talking about this company Symbiosis, they are so passionate about taking care of their clients. They say we and this is exactly how it goes. We love our clients so much that when we kiss them, their lips bleed. So, and I could see if somebody is out of alignment to that vision, that, you know, the boss may sit down with the employee and say, hey, you know, we’re passionate about taking care of our customers. This is our mantra. What is it? By the way, the goal is everybody knows it, it’s memorized. They talk about it. It’s right out there all the time. You know, we love our clients so much your lips bleed, what do you think the way you behave by not calling that client back for three days? Does that fall in alignment with loving our clients so much and being passionate about taking care of them? No, sir doesn’t? Or no, ma’am, it doesn’t. And that’s right. So what do you think would be the right response time and let them work it out. And then you agree with them and say, there you got it. Now go do it. And it’s beautiful.

James Nathan  18:45  If you’re not stopping what you’re doing to call a new inquiry….. It infuriates me when I talk to people and they say, oh James, you call back so quickly and go, well, what did you want me to do? Sit around for half an hour and then call you back? You want to do work with me, I want to work with you.

Shep Hyken  19:02  Right, here in the US. There’s a fast food chain, or quick service chain, as they call them today. It’s called Jimmy Johns, right. Jimmy Johns, you know, they say, and we get your sandwich, freaky fast. So and so I tell them, we are the Jimmy Johns of the speaking industry, if we….. so here’s our process. If a client is interested in hiring us, they may call us. great, somebody’s going to answer the phone, if they call us in the middle of the night, someone’s calling back right away. But many times they go onto our website and there’s a form they fill out. That form goes to all the people here in the company. And by the way, we have a very small company, we’re one of those little tiny companies that still created our service vision. We have basically five people and plus an occasional intern or two. But here’s what happens: that inquiry shows up on everybody’s computer. And within a moment, somebody said we got an inquiry and they look at it within another moment. I’ll take it, and we call them back yet. And they’re often blown away. And we say we recognize that this is important to you. And by the way, you will always hear from somebody, you know today, it was really quick because we were sitting here and we saw it come in, but the worst it’s ever going to be is one business day, that’s the worst, it’s probably going to be in one or two business hours. The exception is Shep’s on an airplane or he’s on a stage and he’s not going to be able to respond to his own emails, obviously, if he’s out of you know, range as far as Wi Fi goes. But even I make it clear, if I can’t respond to somebody because I’m busy and I’m sitting in this office, I will forward the email to my assistant, and she will make sure it gets taken care of. That’s how we run it. That’s how we work. Our clients are amazed. And we tell them: do you want your company to do anything different for your customers? The answer should be no.

James Nathan  20:55  What stops them Shep? Because when you talk like that, I think well, of course you do. You know, it’s important to you. What stops businesses being that effective?

Shep Hyken  21:04  You know, you would think it would be so easy for them to figure out. And that’s a problem. Why is because they haven’t verbalized and then written the process out or written it out and then verbalize it. So let me give you an example. This by the way, I’m about to share with you the number one culture changing tool that we share in our training programs. And it comes right out of a book that I wrote years ago called Cult of the Customer, which will be rereleased next year and all updated. And in the back, we have these exercises, and one of them is called the moments of magic exercise. And all it is is every one of our team here we meet at least once a week, every time we do that Monday morning meeting or it’s usually the first day that I’m in town that week, everybody brings an index card. That’s it, we give everybody an index card at the beginning of the week, and we tell them: sometime in the next week, you’re going to create a moment of magic for one of our clients or maybe a fellow employee, okay, an internal customer, I want you to just write that down two or three sentences, not a novel, it should take it three minutes, two minutes to do with the most, nothing longer than that. And you’re all going to get to share these. So by the way, the same person that was showing up late every day, she came in with her index card, her moment of magic card, and we go around what’s your moment of magic? And she said I had a client who was so impressed how quickly we responded to them, on one of these inquiries that came in. They said it was just amazing. Thank you great moment of magic. And that just lets the rest of the team when they hear it go: yeah, that’s what we need to do to right. Next week. She came in she goes somebody emailed me, and was so impressed that I got back to them within like 10 or 15 minutes. They thought that was just unbelievable. I go well, there you go. The next week, she comes in. She goes, I had a phone call while I was at lunch and somebody took a message. And I called that person back right when I came back from lunch. So it might have been about a half an hour later, maybe 20 minutes later. And and they said they were so impressed. So guess what I’m seeing this pattern from this team member telling me, boy, when I respond quickly, people are impressed. So I said team, what is the typical response time and we all agreed it should be quick. But you know what we’d never written it down. We never made it a formal part of a process that this is what’s expected when we return calls or when return emails or when we respond to those inquiries. And now we have that. And you know, anybody that’s out of alignment on that I get to bring up hey, you know, this is how we do it here. Freaky fast!

James Nathan  23:47  Freaky fast. I’ve got a recruitment client where the phone must be answered within three rings. And you know, I don’t know what their policies on email, I’m going to ask them this week when I go and see ’em because I know the three rings works. When you talk about that. And I in my head, I’m thinking God, you know, to just differentiate yourself is so easy, because all you need to do is, is the right thing every time because nobody else does it. You know, it makes it really easy.

Shep Hyken  24:12  I wouldn’t say nobody else, does. Because enough people don’t, it becomes obvious when it’s done right.

James Nathan  24:20  Exactly, exactly. So if a business now people listening to us are thinking right, we’ve heard Shep talk and he’s mentioned convenience, that sounds like a good kind of, you know, differentiator for my business, how do I go about thinking about it? Or there’s some principles that I can put in place?

Shep Hyken  24:38  Sure. So I’m going to do this in under a minute, I’m going to give you the six principles. And then I’ll share with you how you get started. Alright. So the first principle is, by the way, there’s an element of this and all six is simply reduce friction, find ways to eliminate extra steps, and whatever. And I want you to think about, you know, traditionally, in the past, if you wanted a taxi cab, and you didn’t live in an urban area you would….. like I used to live not not far from the city, but far enough that aren’t cabs driving around all the time. So if I wanted a taxi cab, I’d have to pick up the phone and call, and then I’d have to wait for the cab. And the dispatcher might tell me, the driver should be there within 15 minutes. Okay. And 15 minutes later, what do you think’s happening, I’m wondering if the driver is going to be there. And guess what I usually call the the cab company back and say, hey where’s my taxi? Yeah, I get into the taxi cab when the driver finally shows up. The driver doesn’t know where I’m going. But I tell the driver, and he starts or she starts the meter. And when I get there, they tell me how much it is. And then I pay the driver. Now that’s the way it’s always been done. And along comes Uber or Lyft, or any of the other companies that are now competing in that world. And they said, let’s eliminate almost all of that. Let’s give the customer an app. And by the way, years ago, there were no cell phones or smartphone devices with apps. But now that they’re there today, we capitalize on everything that’s available. And that’s what Uber and Lyft did. They said let’s give everybody an app, you push the button, you see how far away the driver is, you see, we they know where you’re going, and you know what the price is going to be. And once you agree that, hey, that’s a reasonable price, you accept it. And then the drivers on their way, you can see on a little map how far the driver is. When you get into the car. The driver already knows where you’re going. You don’t have to tell them and they know who you are, they actually asked ‘Are you Shep?’ or, you know, ‘are you James?’ Because, you know, they want to make sure they’re picking up the right person? Then when you get to the destination, you don’t have to reach in your pocket and pull out any money, you just leave. Yep. Right. So what they did is eliminated all of these little steps, all the friction. And that’s what eliminating friction is. And I went a little bit long on that one. But very quickly, the other five are number two, to create a self service solution, give the customer control. That’s what Amazon has done when you go and buy things. Or if you have a customer service issue, going online to the website and figuring it out on your own. Number three, using technology to drive a better experience. And there’s lots of ways to do it. The website and self services one, but there’s many different ways. Many technologies are being used to reduce friction and make it more convenient. Number four is to create a subscription model, where once you buy it, and you like it, hey, I’m going to use this up every month. Just send me a new supply every month. One of my favourite clubs is the Dollar Shave Club. Yeah. And it’s now the $10 Shave Club. Because I buy their expensive…

James Nathan  27:45  the stuff that goes with it.

Shep Hyken  27:46  Right. But it’s every every month, they send me a new shipment of what I need to shave, you know, and they asked me, do I want to add shaving cream in this time? Or do I want to do whatever? Yeah, and that’s just it’s automatic. I don’t even have to think about it. They think for me. Number five is delivery. Take it to the customer. You mentioned earlier in the show that you love it when Amazon delivers, like the same day and maybe even an under an hour. Well, that’s delivery on steroids. My car dealership delivered my car to me when it was ready when it finally came in. And they also bring me a car every time I need service, they let you know. So I never have to go in to that dealership, except when I want to buy another car. And that’s a brilliant way of locking me in with that convenient experience. Why would I go anywhere else? And finally, number six is access. And that is how am I available to my customers? If I’m a call center, am I available? When my customers need me? 24/7, am I available? I there’s so many like bankers hours, you know, that’s what they call them. That’s like nine to four, nine to five. And I always say well, the bank is really focusing on what the traditional bankers hours are about the only people that can do business with them are unemployed. We’re available to talk anytime, okay. And I’m being facetious and joke about it. But really, you know, that’s not really accessible to the general public, which is why my lead case study on access was a bank that stays open after hours. It’s open on the weekend. And of course, today you have online banking, which is technology driving a better experience. And access might be logistical? How close am I to my customers. Starbucks? Boy, you go into a major city, and you’re walking through the city. And there’s like a Starbucks on every block or two, that’s logistically accessible. So those are the six principles. And the question you had to me was, where do you start, you start with a journey, map. Make and create the journey that every customer has with you and every interaction point they have. And there’s going to be different journeys for different types of customers or repeat customer, somebody this may be buying a different product line that they might have, they might have a different journey. But you must map those out. And at the top line, look at the interaction points. Is there something you can eliminate? Or something you can make easier? And by the way, do the same thing internally? What’s driving that process? Is there a way to make it easier for employees to do business with each other, and the customer? So that was a very short, this is how you get started. But really, that’d be like there’s no better way to do it.

James Nathan  30:20  Shep. Thank you that that’s really, really helpful. And there’s so many little bits and pieces that come out of those six ideas. And while you were talking there, I was thinking of Starbucks and I don’t know if you’re if you are a Simpsons fan, but there was an episode of The Simpsons donkey’s years ago where Homer went for a walk in the street and every shop was a Starbucks. And you know, it’s not far from the truth. I’ve got a friend who’s walking to base camp at Everest at the moment he’s doing a trek. And there’s three stops on the way and at the second one, he sent me a photo and guess what it was? Starbucks Starbucks right in the middle of…. amazing. But also, that delivery things quite interesting, because I know your quote was that 70% of the population would prefer delivery. I’m surprised it’s only 70%. But I started thinking about professional services businesses, particularly lawyers and accountants, you know, where the old fashioned thing of, you know, we go to see our lawyer, we go to see our accountant, we dress up, we go to their very beautiful offices, and we drink they’re very expensive coffee. And we go away again. And it baffles me that…. why they even have the offices anymore, surely just going to see your clients would be a better way to look after them.

Shep Hyken  31:32  I don’t know where my financial advisor, I don’t think I’ve ever been to his office. And he’s been my advisor for years. I think I’ve been in his area and met him for lunch one day. But whenever we have our reviews, he always comes to me. And how about this? A friend of mine is a dentist. Now you obviously have to go to the dental office. But he says I’ve got a lot of elderly patients. So you know what I do? I have a car service that drives around and picks them up and brings him to me and takes them home. Yeah, that’s delivery.

James Nathan  32:05  Well, that’s amazing. Shep, it’s brilliant talking with you. You know so many things have come out of what you’ve said that I’m sure everyone’s going to go away and start actioning these things straight away. We’ve almost run out of time and appreciate you you’ve got your book, it’s a new version of Be Amazing or Go Home. Is that right?

Shep Hyken  32:26  It’s just….. I was so excited. So I had a book and you know, like The Convenience Revolution was published by Sound Wisdom and Greenleaf published a number of books Wiley published one of my books, but one book that Be Amazing or Go Home, it was just in my head, I said I gotta get this out. And so I actually self published it and put it on the Amazon platform, which was great. It was just, I just had to get it off my desk. I didn’t think a publisher would be interested in it. Well, sure enough, a publisher Sound Wisdom decided we really liked this book, would you give us the rights or sell us the rights. And guess what next week, they’re re-releasing the book. And it’s now available through them. It’s available in paperback as opposed to hardbound and and they’re just great to work with. And we’re going to be working on some other book projects in the next spring, they’re going to rerelease Cult of the Customer, which is now 10 years old. And I had to update all the stats, the facts, I had to get rid of irrelevant companies that were in there. So it’s a it’s not a new book from the standpoint of content. It’s just an updated book. And so it will make a lot more sense to the contemporary reader who buys it today. So those are the big projects we’re working on.

James Nathan  33:38  Well, if I hadn’t read Be Amazing or Go Home, I’d buy it now. But unfortunately, well, fortunately, I bought it the first time around. Shep it’s been fabulous talking to you, really great. Before we go, though, I wonder if you could just leave us with your one big idea, great big Golden Nugget, the one thing that people could go away to do in their business today, to make it better for today and better for the years to come. What would that be?

Shep Hyken  34:04  Great. I’m going to share with you one of my favourite lines that I share with my clients. You know, we’ve talked a lot about customer service and experience. And people think customer services where you go in, there’s a problem. And some people say customer service is what happens when experience goes wrong. I want you to think about it not as a department, not as somebody who’s in charge of customer service. But I want it to be part of your culture. So service is not a department. It is a philosophy to be embraced by everyone. And when you hire to deliver great service, both internally and externally, you’re going to start to create that culture. And you’ll be one of those companies that we talked about at the beginning of our program. You know who sets the benchmark high for everyone else?

James Nathan  34:48  Shep, awesome. Thank you so much.

Shep Hyken  34:51  My pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show.