The Customer Success Playbook

Customer Success Playbook Podcast S3 E41 - Shep Hyken - The Hidden ROI of Convenience

• Kevin Metzger • Season 3 • Episode 41

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In this value-packed episode of the Customer Success Playbook podcast, Shep Hyken returns for Part 2 of our three-part series to address the billion-dollar question: How do companies balance price sensitivity with the growing demand for exceptional customer experiences? From mentalism to magic moments, Shep draws surprising parallels between sleight-of-hand and customer loyalty while unpacking game-changing insights from his CX research.

Detailed Analysis: Kevin Metzger and Roman Trebon dive deep with customer service guru Shep Hyken, and this time it's all about one powerful word: convenience. Drawing from his acclaimed book The Convenience Revolution and the 2025 State of Customer Service and CX report, Shep lays out how brands can make price less relevant by making the customer experience more effortless. And no, that doesn't mean grand gestures—it means smart, consistent, and friction-free experiences.

Key insight? A whopping 59% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better experience, but especially for one that's more convenient. Case in point: Shep shares a brilliant Wall Street Journal case study showing how simplifying subscription forms led to a measurable increase in conversions. The takeaway? Every unnecessary field is a friction point that erodes revenue.

Shep also explores how the pandemic accelerated customer expectations for convenience—a trend that is here to stay. He uses real-life examples, including Amazon and even a local car dealership in St. Louis, to prove that making things easy builds loyalty that price alone can't buy.

And if you thought this was all business, think again. Shep opens the episode with a personal twist—his love for guitar, magic, and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, weaving them seamlessly into his customer service philosophy.

Don't miss this episode if you're in customer success, support, or CX leadership. For more context and deeper insights, explore Shep's full CX research at https://hyken.com/research/.

Now you can interact with us directly by leaving a voice message at https://www.speakpipe.com/CustomerSuccessPlaybook

Check out https://funnelstory.ai/ for more details about Funnelstory. You can also check out our full video review of the product on YouTube at https://youtu.be/4jChYZBVz2Y.

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Kevin Metzger:

Customer success. Hello and welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook podcast. I'm Kevin Metzger here with my co-host Roman Tremont. This is our Wednesday show and we're again joined by Shep Hyken, customer service and experience expert. Roman, how you doing? Yep.

Roman Trebon:

Uh, Kev, I'm, I'm excited to have Shep back. Uh, but before we tackle today's one big question, Kev, we're, we're gonna get to get to know Shep a little bit more. Shep, you've, you're the author of multiple books, right? Do you, do you have a book, a non-business book that has inspired any of your work or it's become a favorite of yours outside of, uh, the business world?

Shep Hyken:

Yeah, great question. I don't know if this is a good answer or not, but I would have to go with, uh, and by the way, you did not prep me on this call. No. So there's two books that come to mind, the Seven Summits. Which is, uh, about two guys that decided to scale the highest summit on each continent. Um, great motivational story, but I'm gonna go with the Fountain Head by Anne Rand. Uh, the reason is, is there is a gentleman that was the main central character who started out at the very bottom of a business. And when I was in college, a friend of mine gave me this book because I didn't know what I was gonna do with my life. I was pumping gas at a gasoline. Actually, I wouldn't even pump a gas. It was self-service. I wasn't allowed to pump gas. I went outside once to pump a lady's gas tank. She was like 85 years old, and it was so cold and I helped her out and my manager got mad at me for pumping the gas at a gas station, but I digress. I was wanting to learn business and this was like how to learn from the bottom up, and he gave me this book and I read it. It's a big, thick book, but what an entertaining read about this character that. Understood business at such a deeper level because he started at the very bottom. I just love the story and, uh, that's, that's an inspiring book for me.

Kevin Metzger:

Uh, love it, love it, love it. Yeah. Um, and. We were talking a little before the show, so I, I suspect I may know the answer to this, but what's a pastime or hobby that keeps you busy outside of, uh, CS CX research?

Shep Hyken:

Uh, sure. Well, I, I have so many hobbies, but I have two favorites and one is music. I play guitar, and the other is magic. I practice my card tricks all the time. Both of those. I'm never a boss.

Roman Trebon:

Oh, chef, you got a favorite. You got a favorite card trick you got a go-to. If you're, uh, you, you're, you know, you're hanging out with a, a group of people, you, you're a go-to card trick.

Shep Hyken:

I, I like being able to have, you know, being able, somebody think of a card, I tell'em what it is kind of thing. I like mentalism mind reading, you know? Yeah. And then again, I love Leigh of hand, so, uh, you know, you put a deck of cards in my hand and, and I'll go for 15, 20 minutes. No problem.

Roman Trebon:

The ultimate icebreaker, you throw a good card trick out, like with an audience and people just lose it. It's, it's, it's the best, absolute best.

Shep Hyken:

Alright, well I actually do a little bit of magic in my speech, so. 1983, which is before some of you were born listening to the show. Probably a lot of, I did my first speech and I was about 23 years older or so. You could do the math and you need to know that since I was 10 or 11 I did card tricks and I worked the eventually birthday party magic shows and eventually. Worked in comedy clubs leading up to when I finally started to become a professional speaker in customer service and experience, which is a whole nother story. But when I started, I thought, I'm gonna talk about how you create a moment of magic for the customer versus a moment of misery or mediocrity, which is that word, you know, we talked about on Monday. Fine, average, satisfactory, but uh, that's. Kind of in the moment of magic, think I should probably do a magic trick to illustrate this point. So I do one or two tricks in a speech every once.

Roman Trebon:

Bring it, bringing it all together. I love it. I love it. Yeah. It's

Shep Hyken:

the sugar that makes the medicine go down when I'm giving them all this information.

Roman Trebon:

That's right. Alright, awesome. Uh, she shep. Well, let's get into our one big question for the day. Sure. So how, how do you recommend companies balance, price, sensitivity? Especially in today's kind of shaky economy against the fact that so many customers say that they would pay for a better customer experience.

Shep Hyken:

Yes, they will pay for a better customer experience, but also recognize the shaky economy does change the numbers a bit. How much more will they pay? I believe that the right level of service and experience makes. Price less relevant, not irrelevant. However, if, if you are a more expensive choice, what are the reasons you're more expensive? Choice. I, I take a look at what I I in our survey that we've talked about, 59% of people are willing to pay more if they know they're gonna receive a better customer experience. But the number one customer experience that customers want even more than a friendly experience, is a convenient experience. If you make it easy, hassle free. And it's like, no issues. I'm gonna pay more because it's just so much easier. Then there's companies out there like Amazon for example, that have not only created a great experience, uh, but, and it's easy and intuitive, but they've also given you a fairly low price. By the way, if they're not the lowest price, they'll say. You can buy this item outside of your Amazon Prime membership at a lower price if you want to take a chance. What they're saying, no, how much lower can it be? Well, it's not that much lower enough. I'm staying with Prime. Why? Because I know it's gonna be delivered. I'll be able to track it if there's easy returns, if there's a problem, that kind of thing. So, uh, I would say that. Price sensitivity is commiserate number one with the overall experience, but number two, you wanna really make price less relevant given the easy, convenient experience.

Kevin Metzger:

Do you see ROI with that? Do you see a return, uh, when you're giving the, the easy experience pretty consistently?

Shep Hyken:

Well, in the book that I wrote titled The Convenience Revolution, which is all about the convenient experience, I'm gonna give you a case study that comes from the Wall Street Journal and it didn't, it wasn't reported to the Wall Street Journal. It's how they gained subscribers. Now consider this, if you were going, uh, to go online and you got the digital copy of the Wall Street Journal, in order to buy it, you need to give them certain information. What the Wall Street Journal was asking was. Name, email address, and then a whole bunch of other questions. Address, regular address, zip code, age, uh, gender, et cetera, et cetera, along with the basic credit card information, payment information. And what they learned was for every field of information that they would eliminate that they really didn't need to get that subscription. Meaning really all I need is name and your email address, where to send it to, and your credit card information. Over time, I'll be able to get. Everything else. But if we eliminate those fields of information from the original ask, when we ask you to sign up and subscribe, they found that they got a little bit better, uh, less cart abandonment. It's like I think the proper terminology. In other words, ask me for less. I'll more likely stay with you and finish the transaction. Keep asking me for all these unimportant stats and facts about myself. You know, why are you asking me this? I'm moving on. So the Wall Street Journal, I thought that's a great case study to recognize for every field of information. Sales went up just a little bit.

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah, that's, that's interesting. I, I, I can't tell you how many times going through a process of trying to check out and start getting questions, especially once you go through like the long form, you know, sales form type things, and then they start asking you lots of questions, uh, drives people right out of the, right out of the funnel.

Roman Trebon:

Shep, you've been doing this for a long time. I, I loved your study and, and we will tell our audience where you can find it, but it, it seems like convenience is king. Right? And I know the technology has changed and, and, and the players have changed, but like, it, it, since you've been doing this, has that changed a lot? Like it seemed just make it easy? Are you seeing a, a change in that or is that how it's always been and we're just, the pieces are, are different.

Shep Hyken:

So it really made a huge change. The convenience idea changed during the pandemic when we had to create a more convenient experience because you weren't allowed to come to our stores or we, you know, we couldn't do the health reasons. So like car dealerships would say, Hey, I. You're interested in the car, we'll bring you a car and you can test drive it. We'll wear masks or we'll not even get in the car with you and let you drive around. That's pretty easy. By the way, the dealership that I loved here in St. Louis where I live long before the pandemic ever hit, said I, I looked around, I said, uh. I may not buy from you because you're so far away from me. And they go, what do you mean? I go, well, you're at least 10 miles away. And the other dealership's like two miles away. But I saw the car in the window and I had to stop to look at it, but I am gonna buy a car. And they said, do you see a waiting room around here? And I looked around and I. I, I don't see it. It's, it's here. It's very small. It's over there.'cause nobody ever waits for their car because if you need service, you call us up, we bring you a loaner, we pick up your car. When your car's ready, we bring it back. So you never have to come in here unless you wanna buy another car. And even then we'll bring you a car to test drive. Yeah. You know, and this was like long before the pandemic. Guess who got my business by the way? They were competitive. They were awesome. They said, you know what, let me write you up a deal and. If you want to take it and think about it for a few days, great. Go to the other dealership. If they give you$1 less, please let us know. We want your business. So they were being, and by the way, I'm not going to bug'em for a dollar. If they were a huge amount, it might have made a difference. But they got my business, they got, you know, everything. And, and we've bought three cars from them since then. Yeah.

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah.

Shep Hyken:

I love it.

Roman Trebon:

Chef. This is awesome stuff. You're gonna come back, join us Friday. Friday is we always do AI Friday. AI Friday. AI Friday. What's the,

Shep Hyken:

what's the literation on that? AI Friday

Roman Trebon:

ai. Friday Artificial intelligence. Friday. We say Friday. Yay. We tried to do a couple variations. I get

Shep Hyken:

Taco Tuesday. We can

Roman Trebon:

talk us through that. We gotta figure out a, a Friday thing here, Kev. We're still, we're struggling with that. Still working with it. We'll talk AI on Friday with Shep, and we're gonna talk about how AI is both transforming and challenging customer support and experience. We'll dig into Shep's report and see what it says to our audience. Thanks always for listening. We really appreciate. Make sure you subscribe like the show. You'll get notified when our Friday episode gets released. And until next time, Kevin, keep on playing.

People on this episode

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Kevin Metzger

Co-host
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Roman Trebon

Co-host
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Shep Hyken

Guest