6 Strategies to Improve Company Culture (feat. Shep Hyken)

Hi, I'm Susan Drum. And welcome to the enlightened Executive where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help entrepreneurs and executives get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness. Today we are focusing on all things customer experience. And I am delighted to introduce Shep Hyken. Shep is a customer service and experience expert and the chief amazement officer of Shepherd Presentations. He's a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best selling 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 with customers and employees. He's worked with hundreds of clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies to those less than 50 employees. So welcome Shep. Thank you so much for being here.

Hey, thanks for that great introduction.

My mother would be very proud of you. Proud of me because of that. So thank you. Thank you.

Yes, yes. So tell us, what should senior executives and entrepreneurs know about companies customer experience that maybe they don't know?

Sure. What a great way. You just dive right into it. I love that about you, Susan.

Let's not waste time.

So the whole concept of customer service and experience, as many people think it's a department, it's a strategy. But you know what, it's the culture. And if you look at the very best companies to do business with and you then go take a look, and by the way, you can get all that information through surveys like the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Doesn't that sound exciting? But it's put out by the University of Michigan's business school. That's every year. And it rates all the industries, different companies in the industry. But then you go over to glassdoor.com and you take a look at the best companies to work for and you're going to find the best companies to do business with are often also the very best companies to work for because this is embedded into the culture. And it's not a department, it's not a strategy. It's really everybody's job. And everybody recognizes they not only take care of their customers on the outside, but their internal customers as well, people they work with.

Yeah. So that's what was fascinating as we were touching base a little bit before we started, that the work is not just about what the customer experience is, but it's also about what do your employees experience. So can you share a little bit more about that and why you take that approach?

Yeah.

So there is the CX customer experience in the ex. And if you put them together, it's cex, and it's the customer and employee experience. And really, it amazes me is that we're supposed to take care of our customers. But you know what? If you don't give the people who you work with the tools they need to get their job done most effectively, how can they properly engage? Or maybe they become disenchanted and aren't as engaged as they should be with their customers. Brian Keeley, his name, you wouldn't know. I don't even know if he's still there. But he was. When I wrote this book, the Amazement Revolution, he was the CEO of Baptist Health South. And I wrote a chapter called Fun F U N. But not like, let's have fun and have a party at work. F U N was an acronym, Fulfillment, Uniqueness, and Next. And he was my lead case study because his goal was to create a culture in the organization. He called it destination employment. So when you came to work at Baptist Health south, you would never want to leave because you love it there so much. And he firmly believed that if we create that experience for our employees, they're going to turn around, reciprocate, and deliver to the patients, their families, as well as what they would consider their customers as doctors and nurses and other personnel. But that was just really a great interview that I had and a great study. By the way, F stands for fulfillment. Can you get your employees fulfilled with their job? And we looked at all kinds of different companies. We even cited Google, who lets their engineers spend, I think, 10 or 15% of their time doing whatever they want. Within Google, anything you want to work on another project, take a little bit of time throughout the week and do that because they figured that, or maybe there was data behind it that said if a person could spend even the smallest amount of time on something they love doing, it makes up for some of what they might not enjoy as much. But then they. They'll love their job, and that's part of it. Uniqueness is what can you bring me in? Your personality and your background that's unique, that I can exploit and you can use in your job. Perhaps you're bilingual, so we'll bring you in and have you talk to whatever your other language is to some of our customers that might speak that language that would fulfill you, right? And then what's next? N is for next. Are you excited about projects that are coming down the pike?

Are you excited about, you know, anything.

New, expansion, or are you just excited about the company and can't wait to Come back the next day. But that's what Brian Keeley was trying to deliver. And really at that point, you're focusing on culture. It's all about culture. And as leaders, whether you're an entrepreneur of a small business, startup business, or you're running a huge business, you have to recognize that it's cultural. And know what else it starts with you at the top.

Absolutely. So I love when you first said fulfillment, I thought you were thinking fulfillment on giving a customer order. Right.

Promises and fulfilling an order.

Correct.

But I love the use of it here because it's our employees fulfilled at what they do. Because if they're excited about working there, then that enthusiasm is going to translate. When they have to interact with your customers, if they love what they're doing, naturally it'll come through. And so I love that. Yes, you have to fulfill on delivering on orders, but what you really also need to look at is what is the experience of the employee inside. And I love, since I do a lot of work on that piece, I love that your work focuses on that as well.

Well, thank you. Two quick, real examples. Herb Kelleher, we remember who Herb was. He founded or was one of the founders of Southwest Airlines back when they were a startup. Somebody asked him what's more important, the stakeholders to define stakeholder in that form. It was the investors. Who's more important to you? The investors or stakeholders? Your employees or your passengers? And the way it was presented to him, it was kind of a conundrum at first. And then he thought about it and he said, you know what, we've got to take care of the employees first. If they are happy, they'll take care of the passengers. And if they're happy, they'll fly again on the airline. And that's going to make our stakeholders happy. Another quick example is many times we do as companies come up with very customer focused ideas and say for example, in a customer support center, we create a process that's great for the customer. It's less friction for them to talk to us. It's easier to get their information, but at the same time it's harder on the employee and it's an extra step or two. And guess what happens? The employees don't like it. Even though it's better for the customer. You've got to find that balance. And that's what we're talking about here.

Yeah, absolutely. So besides this mindset shift of if you want to improve your customer experience, you also need to improve your employee experience. Are there other things that maybe are a mindset shift or surprising when people engage with you on what CEOs need to do differently?

I don't think that it's really as surprising as it is relatively simple. And I say simple, but I was, I'm going to share with you a process that we take our clients through at the C level. If you want to start to change a culture and understand that 80% of the companies that call us for help in the customer service and experience world, they're already rock stars. They're trying to stay at the top of their game and they're saying, what can we do to freshen it up? They don't want to change so much any themes of what they're doing that's important. So less than 20% are saying, hey, we got a problem, help us fix it. But in both cases, we take our clients through this process. I was talking about this in a speech one day and a gentleman raised his hand and he kept saying, you keep calling these six simple steps. I mean, how simple are they? And I said, sir, how many people are in your organization? He was a chief operating officer of a company that had 35,000 employees worldwide. And I said, simple doesn't mean easy. Remember that simple common sense. Sometimes it's not so common, but also if you want to implement common sense, it's not always easy to get people to buy into something that seems like it should be common sense. 35,000 people around the world, you've got different cultures, different demographics of customers throughout the world. You're going to have to make adaption to a lot of these ideas. But in principle, they're all the same. And if you like, I'll walk you through the six and I'll try to do it in a relatively short period of time. So the first one really does start at the top. And what we do is we go in with a client and we sit down with their C suite. We actually ask other people within the organization to come in, maybe somebody on the front line, even somebody in the.

Warehouse, just a few players.

Because what we're about to ask them to do is come up with what we call the mantra. And this is a customer service or customer experience, depending on how you want.

To look at it.

The vision for that one thing. Now you've got your company vision, your mission statements, et cetera, et cetera. This is just a one sentence description of what you would like your experience for your customers to be. And I'll give you an example. The Ritz Carlton is my very favorite. Horst Schultz from he was the first president and co founder of the organization. He came in with this idea, nine words, we're ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. Nine words, that's it. And he said, if we understand that and we train all of our employees, our ladies and gentlemen who work for us, to deliver to other ladies and gentlemen, we're going to be a winner. And he created 24 gold standards. And, and the moment you go to work for the Ritz, you understand what they actually call it, their credo. But anything that's one sentence or less to me is like a mantra. And he said they understand what it's about and then we train them to that, regardless of whether they're in the housekeeping staff, the engineering staff, they're in the front desk, they're at the restaurants, doesn't matter. Everybody understands we're ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. And we understand the 24 gold standards and other areas that are specific to our business.

So that's just to your point, by the way, that mantra boils it down to something very simple.

Yep.

As you said. So if you want to drill in a mindset or a belief, it's gotta be simple and short such that everyone can remember it.

And that's the point. Everybody knows it, remembers it. And if you walk up to somebody, say, you know, what's our mantra and ours, here is three words long. Always be amazing. We want to be amazing to our clients and teach our clients to be amazing to their customers and clients and guests and members, whatever their business is and whatever they call their customers. That's simple. And once you set that, now you have to, number two, communicate it to everyone. And communication means not just like, hey, let's have a big party or a celebration and introduce this theme at our next meeting. And then it goes away. No, this is forever. And it stays on your walls. The Ritz Carlton everybody carries a laminated card around that has the credo and their commandments and other interesting service focused ideas in that everybody knows it, they pretty much memorize it. Toyota had theirs and it was actually a paragraph, it was a little long. But I was amazed. As I was working with executives at Toyota and Lexus, I would ask them, can you recite your credo if you will? And they could. Now I remember all my buddies in college could recite the side of a Budweiser can. You know, there is no beer or whatever it is. Right, right. But you know what? Guess what? The executives in the company at Anheuser Busch could recite it as Well, I mean, you need to create these vision statements, if you will, of what you want your customers to understand. I call that the customer service vision. We call it a mantra because it should be shorter and than one sentence and everybody memorize it. Number two, communicate. And that means signs on the wall all the time reminding people. It's brought up over and over again. It's hit at different angles. So maybe we bring it up same words, but we express it a different way. Number three, and this is really important training. Everybody gets trained, and it's not about onboarding and giving them an introduction to what we're about. No, it is consistent and relentless. All. Not. Not all the time every week. Although in some cases it can be. We actually recommend for our clients that they have their weekly meetings, huddles, even if they're meeting in small groups and departments within their own larger organizations, that they take five, six minutes once a week at least to talk about what did you do in taking care of a customer? We have all kinds of questions that start a conversation for that.

Yes. Well, one thing about that is because, you know, you can have this mantra, but it could mean different things to different people. And so you want to build a consistent theme, right, about what does it mean to live out, let's say the Ritz Carl, what does that really look like? What is a lady? What is a gentleman? How am I that? How am I serving that? And it sounds like you do that through the stories that people tell.

The story is the most powerful way. So the once a week meeting. The easiest way to start a conversation is to assign your group who you meet with once a week. It takes two minutes to do. It's not like a big assignment. It should fit on an index card, a very small card, two or three sentences. What's interesting is people can write it in two or three sentences and they say, can you share your moment of magic, which is a positive customer experience with me? And they look at it and then they talk for five minutes about the two or three sentences on the card. It's pretty fun. But the reality is we're sharing stories. So for example, our small company, every week we have our meeting and we always start off by talking about the moment of magic that we created either for an internal customer, a colleague, or an outside customer. And everybody goes around and shares. And sometimes we get some great stories and sometimes they're so good. And we keep hearing certain things like, you know, we need to operationalize that. So by hearing stories, we're able to do that. But you can say, give me an example of when you created a positive experience. Give me an example when somebody came to you with a problem that you solved a complaint that you resolved. Give me an example when you proactively recognized an issue and you went and fixed it, and then you told either your colleague or the customer, hey, by the way, I don't know if you knew this. We fixed something. You should know what we did. So you can have these different types of examples that are shared.

Those are great questions. I love them.

Yeah. What the Ritz does is really interesting. They have 24 gold standards. I mentioned this earlier. And they before every shift, every department has a short team meeting before they go off and do their work. And the manager talks about one of those gold standards. And they go 1 through 24. And at the end of 24, it's like, I've heard that with shampoo, you're supposed to lather, rinse, and then repeat. I haven't done that in a long time, apparently. But that's what happens at the end of 24 days in a row of 1 through 24, they start over with number one. And Horst said that way by the end of the year, each member, lady or gentleman, team member, has heard at least about 10 times these 24 ideas, these 24 gold standards. Well, I'm in St. Louis, Missouri, and Susan, where do you live?

Scottsdale, Arizona.

And there will be another Ritz in Scottsdale.

Yes, there will be.

Yes. And that Ritz, when they share the gold standard, that day it will be the same one in St. Louis, that day it'll be the same one in Abu Dhabi. Okay. That's the consistency that they have throughout the entire organization. Every day, 24 days straight, then they do it over again. And it's the same in every one of their locations. I mean, they've got it down. So that's training and onboarding. You know, give them a little bit more, maybe once every six months a year, give them a deeper dive. But ongoing, weekly or at least monthly, you've got to do something to keep it in front of them. So that's number three, training. Define it, communicate it, train it. Number four, all about leadership. And I'll throw it down to anybody that's in management or supervisor roles as well. But specifically leaders. We must be the role models for everyone else. You can't expect to act a certain way and then other people to do something different. You know, do what I say, not what I do, is just doesn't work. Disney, Walt Disney, when he was Alive. He would go into the theme parks, and people, everybody knew who Walt Disney was. And the cast members, their employees would say, oh, there's Mr. Disney. What's he gonna do? Is he gonna come over here? And they'd watch him. And he would, of course, walk around. He'd ride the rides and talk to the employees, again, the cast members. But he would see a piece of trash on the ground, and he hated to see trash on the ground. He wanted those parks to be spotlessly clean. Did he say to somebody, hey, there's trash on the ground? No. He went over and he stooped down and he picked it up himself and he threw it away. And he knew everybody was watching him. He called that stooping to excellence, because.

He was showing that if he was.

Willing to do it, everybody should do it, because that's excellent behavior, and it starts at the top. We're role models as leaders. That's what we are. And you've got to get your managers and supervisors to buy into that as well, because as they're dealing with specific people that they work with, they've got to be those role models.

Shep, have you seen an example of where someone did not walk the talk? What I find in coaching leaders is they think they do. But if you talk to the employees, they're like, nah, they're not really walking the talk. And I imagine you might have an example or two like that.

There's examples. I mean, it's very simple. And you can tell that's where the culture erodes. But my favorite examples are actually the opposite, where I was hired by a client, a major investment company that had offices throughout the entire country. And there was this one regional president, and I believe we did 11 cities in his region. And my trainer, I would do the speech. My trainer would then follow with a full day of training. The president would travel with me. He would introduce me. And you think at that point, he'd seen it before? By the 9th or 10th or 11th time, you think he'd even want to sit through it again? He not only sat through my program, he sat through the entire day of training. Now he was in the back. He was doing work, but he was there. And he showed his people where we went to other regions, and that was not the case. Interestingly enough, his region was the number one region in client retention and employee retention.

Wow.

Imagine that. Guess what? The ones that I never met the president, maybe he showed up once. He sent other people to introduce him. We were supposed to have dinner. He had to cancel at the Last minute. Those were some of the worst performing.

Because you're showing people what you care about.

Right.

Or what you don't care about.

Yes.

Which is sometimes even more visible. I had a major client that I was supposed to work with. It was so big that I actually went on the initial. I usually send my trainer to make the sales calls because they're going to be the trainer and do the job. But this was big. So I went with him. And when I got there, they're, I guess, three owners of the company, big company, worldwide manufacturer, and very successful. But one of the guys wasn't there, and I said, where is he? They rolled their eyes. He's just not in agreement with what we're trying to do. And I go, well, how could you possibly want to spend the money on what we're about to present if that person is going to sabotage every effort? Not only that, they're going to criticize you for everything you do related to this project. We're going to fail before you even get in the door. And we walked away from that. And that was not easy to do. But if you don't have buy in at the top, it's not going to happen anywhere else.

And I've seen this too, in kicking off leadership development programs where I always want the leader to come. But not only do they need to do that, they need to go through the program themselves. Even though they're like, I'm bringing you in to do my next level down, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to guess that probably there's something in there for you. And so if you take the initiative and invest the time, then so shall the others deem it as important as you do.

We have an online training program. We have a suite of six courses, one of which is a leadership course. But the flagship course is the most important one that every employee should go through. And it teaches terminology that you're going to want to use. Like, we talk about moments of magic, moments of misery, moments of mediocrity, moments of innovation. And these are all important because as people throughout the organization start to use them after they've been trained, shouldn't the leaders know what they're talking about? So the cool thing is we can track, measure and monitor the progress of every one of our clients. We can see if we've sold them a license for 500 or 1,000 or 5,000 people. We can see 82% of them have gone through the course. And when we know the name of the CEO or the COO or The VP of whatever. We can go in and see if they've taken it. And if they haven't, oh, do I get to have a fun phone call? And it is a fun one for me because I'm not going to criticize them and beat them up. But I'm going to tell them, everybody, we've got to all be on the same page. Please take the time to do it. If you want, I'll spend 20 minutes with you on the phone and give you a crash course or we'll do a zoom call with your team. But you've got to know the language that everybody's speaking out there.

Yeah, you've got to mirror, you've got to walk the talk. So, okay, so there's more.

So that was number four. The next two are pretty quick. Number five is, and this one came as a result. I was interviewing, oh, I don't know, a hundred and some odd C level folks. And I said, what's your most important job? And I had to add this into my list of the six steps. And one of these people said, and he had a nice retail chain of, I'm going to say about 15 stores. They probably did, you know, 100 and some odd million dollars a year through these stores. And I said, what's your most important job? And he said, to defend the culture. So he was already buying into all of what we're talking about, not necessarily what I had taught him, but he was into this whole thing with the culture. And he said, my job is to defend it. Sure, I make deals and I decide what's going to work and make the final decisions. But you know what? I've got to defend that culture. And that's so important. If one person is out of alignment, we've got to manage and coach them and mentor them. If it's a region of a larger worldwide company, maybe it's, you know, they're not getting the numbers that the rest of the regions are getting. You know, you've got same thing. You got to, got to get in there and you've got to create this consistent, predictable experience because anything less than that in a small little area could potentially erode your brand. So I always say, if you got 100 great employees and one that's not good, the 101st one is not good. And I happen to call you and get that 101st employee that day. Do you know what I think of the rest of your employees? This is what I say. You know, they aren't very friendly over there.

Well, who's they.

It was one person, but, you know, one person represents everybody at that point.

Yes, exactly. That must be. I imagine some leaders take that well. How can you possibly make sure that all 101 are at the level you need? Aren't you sometimes going to have bad apples? And how do you.

Sure you are. And so, number one, it starts with hiring the right people and onboarding them properly. Onboarding oftentimes starts before they even get there for the first day of work. Maybe it's part of the interview process. We mentioned Disney. Disney starts to teach you about their culture and the application process, then the interview process. And by the time you decide whether you want the job or not, you may already know whether you want to work there or not because of, you know, what's. What you've learned about them throughout. So that's important. You hire right, then you train. Right. And then you constantly train and make sure that. But your management team, your supervisors, they really have to be in tune with all of this. So that's a real important piece of it. If somebody's out of alignment, if you can't train them and coach them properly, they need to be moved to a different place in the company or they need to be taken out of the company. As bad as that sounds, it's, you know, you can't let that one bad apple spoil the whole bunch. There was a healthcare system back and totally unrelated to Baptist Health South. And I can't give you this client's name because I don't know if they would be happy if everyone knew. But what they did is they shut down a portion of their medical center because they couldn't hire enough. They could get as many skilled nurses as they wanted. They couldn't get the nurses with the right personalities. And they were worried that if they. Just because they hired somebody that was really good, it could be abrasive to a family member or patient, and it would just erode everything they stood for.

Interesting interest.

They shut down actually a portion of their medical center until they properly staffed.

Yeah, yeah.

So what's the next dream?

Yeah, that is. I mean, but they took it seriously enough, like, we got to get this right before we come back to the marketplace place. Otherwise, you create the reputation and then it's very hard to undo it later. Right.

Inconsistency erodes trust. And it could be. And if you look at reviews, you know, and everybody looks at reviews today as they're getting ready to buy certain things, but, you know, a perfect review is skeptical. Seeing a couple of bad reviews and A bunch of great reviews. That's perfect. As a matter of fact, Northwestern University a number of years ago did a study that said the perfect score is a 4.2 to a 4.5. If you've got like, you know, perfect fives, you gotta wonder, are these all friends? Did they game it, you know, whoever. So you asked about number six.

Easy.

Celebrate it when it works. Let people know they're doing a great job.

I love it.

It's pretty much that easy. And you can do it. You can do it through true celebration through one on one recognition. You know, a complimentary note from your, you know, CEO. A friend of mine, Howard Putnam, was the worked with Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines. And Howard, I think is, was like the first president of Southwest. And when some flight attendant did such a great job, he hand wrote a note as he did for many flight attendants and other personnel of southwest. And like 25 years later, she's retired and she sees Howard Putnam out when she was traveling and she says, Mr. Putnam, Mr. Putnam, I used to work for you. Let me show you something. She opened up her purse and pulled out A letter from 25 years ago from him. That's how much it meant to her. Celebrate it either personally or as a group. But let everybody know if it's working and they're doing a great job and.

They won't forget it and they'll do more of it for you.

Yeah, yeah. And it's just this vicious cycle, but it's a good cycle.

Yes. Well, I love the work that you're doing because it does so much incorporate the employees experience and that that's paramount to how you're going to serve your customers. So really valuing that stakeholder group. Now, where can people learn more if they want to learn more about how to be always amazing, all you need.

To do is go to hyken.com, h y k e n.com and can I tell you what's most exciting about what's new? And I think you already know. Okay, when they get there, they're going.

To learn more about I'll Be Back.

My latest book, it won't be out actually for a while. However, anybody that buys the book now will get the book shipped when it comes out, but they get the ebook sent to them immediately so they can get their customers and clients and whatever they want to call them to start saying, I'll be back as soon as possible.

And you go, I'll be back.

Book.com. there's no apostrophe in a website. So it's I'll be back.

Book.com and all about retention.

Yeah.

How do you get your customers to.

Come back again and again? That's what we want, isn't it?

It is. Absolutely. So we'll be back with the next episode of the Enlightened Executive. And if you loved this episode, you'll definitely want to check out Aaron Snyder of Landmark Worldwide and how their programs create incredible breakthrough for leaders across the globe.

Hey, thanks for having me. Great to see you, Susan.

Hope you enjoyed today's episode. And I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of the Enlightened Executive. Sam.