Podcast

Common Sense Ways to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again

Welcome to the show Shep Hyken

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert and a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. Shep works with companies and organizations that want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees. His articles have been read in hundreds of publications, and he’s the author of 8 books, including his newest book I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again. He is also the creator of The Customer Focus™, a customer service training program that helps clients develop a customer service culture and loyalty mindset.

The I’ll Be Back Mentality

Shep’s new book, I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again, is all about navigating the world of customer service and experience in a way that builds trust and loyalty between your customers and your business.

“It’s what your customer is giving you – not in the form of a trophy and your opportunity to get up on a stage and talk – but in the form of giving you their money for whatever it is that you sell because they trust you, they respect you, they have confidence in you, and they want to do business with you. Your goal is to not let them down so that they do in fact, come back.”

By offering a valuable and unparalleled customer experience, your customers will not only adopt the “I’ll Be Back” mentality, but they will insist that others do the same as well.

Loyalty and Advocacy

We talk a lot on our show about the customer journey: we begin with a customer’s awareness of your product or service; this turns to their consideration of what you can offer them compared to your competitors; next, you confirm the relationship between you and the customer in the conversion stage; the loyalty stage comes when the customer continues to purchase from you and request your support; and finally, the loyal customers will become advocates of your business.

What often happens is that businesses will make it through the first three stages of the customer journey– they have made a sale and they believe that is the main value point of the customer journey – and they fail to nourish and attend to the loyalty and advocacy stages.

“Loyalty is often confused because a customer comes back again and again. That is not a loyal customer, that is a repeat customer […] getting them to come back is step one, getting them to become loyal is step two.”

For Shep, the real differentiation is when businesses prioritize and centre the loyalty and advocacy phases of the customer journey. Have you done enough to provide a customer experience wherein your customer trusts you enough to come back? And further, do they have enough confidence in you that they will advocate for and recommend your business to others? How do we foster this kind of customer experience?

Creating a Customer-Focused Culture

Shep tells us there are 6 steps to achieving a customer-focused culture in your business:

Define your vision;
Communicate it and communicate it all the time;
Train everybody to it. This is more than just people on the front line of your business, it’s everybody, including people behind the scenes. It is important that everyone knows their value as a part of the entire customer experience;
Leadership, management, and supervisors need to be the role models of their own vision and act out the right behaviour;
Leadership needs to defend the culture and address when something has gone wrong;
Celebrate it when it works!

You can check out Shep’s full article on the 6 D’s of creating a customer-centric culture here.

Fast Favourites

At The Common Sense Professional, we like to ask our guests a rapid-fire round of questions to get to know their favourite things in the tech space right now.

Favourite tech or business tool you are using today? LinkedIn
Favourite recent podcast? Amazing Business Radio and The Common Sense Professional

Keep Up With Shep!

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