Convenience helps you stand out and creates fierce loyalty – Interview with Shep Hyken

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Today’s interview is with Shep Hyken, who is the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations and a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. Shep joins me today today to talk about his latest book: The Convenience Revolution: How to Deliver a Customer Service Experience That Disrupts the Competition and Creates Fierce Loyalty, why convenience, the dimensions of convenience and how to use it to make a difference to your business’ service and experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why B2B sales people need to be concerned about customer experience – Interview with Will Barron – and is number 280 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my interview with Shep:

• The new book is all about convenience and how convenience is a service and experience strategy. It is a philosophy.
• The book is based around six areas of convenience/principles.
• Shep believes that Amazon are the most convenient company in the world and that they excel when measured against all six of his principles.
• The Six Principles of the Convenience Revolution are:
  • Principle One: Reduce Friction – Make it as easy as possible for your customer to do business with you.
  • Principle Two: Self-Service – Let your customers control the transaction/interaction.
  • Principle Three: Technology – Create new processes, tools and ways of interacting that make life easier for customers.
  • Principle Four: Subscription – Establish automated, scheduled delivery of products and ser- vices that people use on a regular basis.
  • Principle Five: Delivery – Bring the product to the customer, rather than making the cus- tomer go to the product.
  • Principle Six: Access – Decide where your market is … and then make sure you’re there.
• Shep shares a whole heap of examples that illustrate these principles in action. Here’s some stand out examples:
  • Amazon’s Dash Button which is a Wi-Fi connected device that ensures you never run out of essential household products etc.
  • Panera have experimented with all sorts of methods for speeding up and smoothing the food serving process. Now they have introduced self-service kiosks where customers can place an order and skip waiting in line. However, they have not reduced their employee numbers because of the introduction of the kiosk but rather they have redeployed them to be able to bring out the food, engage with customers and create better connections with them.
  • PayPal and how, once you are in their system, anyone who has your email address can send you money from anywhere in the world in 30 seconds.
  • The No Wait App allows customers to view the wait time at participating restaurants and take a virtual space in line.
  • Ace Hardware has a subscription service where they send their customers new filters for their furnaces or their air conditioners every six months. Whilst that is a convenient service it also acts as a reminder to customers to help them remember to change their filters.
  • Shep’s local car dealership which ensures that every time your car needs a service or any other bit of work that needs doing they come and pick it up from you, provide you with a courtesy car, whilst they are working on it, and deliver it right back to you at your convenience. That means that the only other time you will need to visit the dealership is to buy a new car!
  • Insomnia Cookies, specializes in delivering warm and delicious cookies to individuals and companies up to 3am in the morning.
  • Anytime Fitness who operate gyms which are open 24 hours a day. They even give the members who join their gym access even if nobody’s there.
• Grab a copy of the book: The Convenience Revolution: How to Deliver a Customer Service Experience That Disrupts the Competition and Creates Fierce Loyalty.
• Check out the book site: www.beconvenient.com

About Shep

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert and the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations. He is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author and has been inducted into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement in the speaking profession.

Shep works with companies and organizations who want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees. His articles have been read in hundreds of publications, and he is the author of Moments of Magic®, The Loyal Customer, The Cult of the Customer, The Amazement Revolution, Amaze Every Customer Every Time and Be Amazing or Go Home. He is also the creator of The Customer Focus™, a customer service training program which helps clients develop a customer service culture and loyalty mindset.

Here’s what you should do:

• Check out www.beconvenient.com the new book’s site
• Grab a copy of his new book: The Convenience Revolution: How to Deliver a Customer Service Experience That Disrupts the Competition and Creates Fierce Loyalty
• Have a look at his website: www.hyken.com and
• Connect with him on Twitter @Hyken and LinkedIn here.

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  Thanks to Pixabay for the image.