307: How Customers Experience AI; with Shep Hyken

AI can make customer support faster, cheaper, and more consistent, but it can also quietly destroy trust when it becomes a wall between customers and real help. Charlotte Ward sits down with customer experience expert Shep Hyken to get brutally clear on what never changes: customers want to be happy, they want you to take care of them, they want it to be easy, and when something breaks they want it fixed. The channel is secondary. The feeling is the product.

We unpack why Amazon is one of the few brands that can run an overwhelmingly digital service model without making customers feel abandoned, and what most companies get wrong when they use AI as contact deflection. Shep shares why the human touch is not going away, it is flipping into a competitive advantage that strengthens the digital experience. We also get into proactive communication that reduces anger (knowledge is power), why “silence kills trust”, and how to design escalation so customers do not have to repeat themselves.

You will also hear surprising research on support preferences across generations, what it means when Gen Z starts choosing the phone more often for real problems, and why “time to happiness” may be a better north star than average handle time. If you are building AI customer service, contact center automation, self-service, or omnichannel support, this conversation will help you keep speed without sacrificing the relationship.

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Transcript

Welcome And Why AI Matters

Charlotte Ward 0:12

Hello and welcome to episode three hundred and seven of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Shep Hyken to talk about how customers experience AI. So today I'd like to welcome Shep Hyken. Shep, it's lovely to have you on the podcast. I feel like I've seen you so often on LinkedIn and just uh like just exuding experience in the customer experience world. Um you you've someone that I've wanted to speak to for such a long time. So thank you for coming on. And would you like to introduce yourself for the listeners?

Shep Hyken 0:55

Well, thank you very much. I think you did a great job just introducing me. The reason you see me on LinkedIn all the time, it's not like I'm always there, but I'm there almost every day.

Charlotte Ward 1:03

Yeah.

Shep Hyken 1:03

I have hopefully something good to say. I I read a ton about customer service and experience. I share my thoughts, my feelings, but I've been doing this for a long time, and I love that you're

What Customers Always Want

Shep Hyken 1:15

having me on the show and getting to talk about. Really, I I do want to set something up. Can I do that?

Charlotte Ward 1:20

You can. 100%.

Shep Hyken 1:23

Even though you want to talk about AI, people are saying, no, it's all changed. Customer service has changed, customer experience has changed. No, it hasn't. You can go back a thousand years ago. Here's what the customer wants. I want to be happy. I want you to take care of me. I want to be easy. If there's a problem, I want you to fix it. Nothing will change in another thousand years. That's what customers are going to expect. And how we go about it, maybe that's changed in some cases quite a bit. But overall, nothing has really changed when you think about the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Charlotte Ward 1:58

Oh, you I couldn't put it better myself, Shep. I I really couldn't. Um, you know, whether I am talking to an AI agent or a real agent or my CSM, some enterprise business, what I want is a business that keeps me happy and meets my needs.

Shep Hyken 2:13

Bingo. What else? You don't, you know, if you do that every time, this is what customers say. I love doing business with them, even though you just mentioned a CSM, a person, one person representing an entire organization. But I love doing business with them. They're always helpful. They're always friendly, they always get back to me. They always do what they promise. When there's a problem, I know they can always, uh, they're gonna always step up to take care of me. So when you have that word always, followed by something positive that meets your expectations, then why would a customer choose to do business anywhere else? They'd be taking a chance. And that's how you keep your customers coming back again and again.

Charlotte Ward 2:53

Yeah, you know, it was so keyed into that word as you were saying that always, always, always. And and I think most reasonable customers most of the time to to hit that like always word. Like if you're always meeting their needs and always solving their problems, why wouldn't they keep coming back, even if it was AI or a human or you know, uh an automated something or other? Like make it easy, right? It's about friction and and lowering that and and like keeping them coming back because they'll only keep coming back if they feel that always word.

Shep Hyken 3:32

Yeah.

Amazon And The No Frustration Path

Shep Hyken 3:33

And you know, you mentioned uh the digital or AI experience. There's very few companies that have been able to be for the majority, when I say majority, like 98% AI or digitally focused. Companies like Amazon have figured out how to do it. But I want to tell you the difference between Amazon and most other companies. When you go back to the roots of Amazon, what did Amazon want to do? And this was before AI, there actually was AI, but it just wasn't something that we talked about the way we talk about today. What Jeff Bezos wanted to do when Amazon started, they were a bookstore. He goes, I'm gonna make this so easy for people to buy books and we're gonna charge a little bit less money because we don't have to have brick and mortar stores, we're gonna have everything in a warehouse. We're gonna create this incredible website. We're gonna allow people to preview the book by looking at the first few pages. And when they order the book online for a little bit of a discount, it'll be delivered to them in several days. Uh totally easy to return if there's a problem. And that is what he was doing. He was so obsessed with an experience that would get the customer to keep coming back again and again. Today, many companies are using AI to deflect the experience that customers have always had. In some cases, they think it actually enhances the experience, and it does in some cases. But in other cases, customers are seeing and feeling as if it is a deflection. They don't want to talk to me. They're making it hard for me to talk to a human being. Even Amazon, which is 98%, if not more, digital, uh, it when there's a problem, you go online and it says, you know, there's a form, uh, more or less, or a site you go to for their customer support. It's a page. You know, what's the order number? Okay, what's the problem? And as it drills down further and further, it starts to assess do you need to talk to somebody or can we keep going? You know, can I just make this easy? Sounds like you got a bad problem. You know what we're gonna do? We're gonna send you another one out right away. It should be there tomorrow. There'll be a label, return the old one, or just keep the old one. It depends what it is. But at a certain point in time, it will also say if you feel you need to talk to a live agent, type your phone number in here. And about the time you hit enter, after you type the phone number and the phone is ringing within a nanosecond, and it's somebody on the other end saying, uh, Mr. Hiken, I'm calling about this situation, right? Yeah. I see that, and then they just go into what the problem is without you having to repeat it or talk about it. Maybe they have questions, but that's how it gets done over there. That is the every single intention they had was to take care of the customer. And AI or a digital experience was part of that. Other companies, some are getting it, but many are thinking that it will create a convenience or lower friction in reality. It does until it doesn't, and then it's a nightmare. That's where uh you end up losing customers.

Charlotte Ward 6:37

Very true. I mean, there was another word, like I I think what's really interesting as we talk about this is the words that we're repeating are the words that I think like in our like viscerally, we all know, we all recognize as customers, never mind as service providers or uh di people who are delivering some sort of customer experience or other. The other word you said there repeatedly was easy. And yeah, easy.

Shep Hyken 7:01

It's actually the easy is not easy. It's hard. It's hard to be easy.

Charlotte Ward 7:07

It's hard to be easy, but if anything, AI makes it easier to be easy if you get it right, if it's consistent, if customers know what to expect. And I think I think this is something that to your point, Amazon has done really well. It's trained their customers to know what to expect. And it always to touch that first word we said, it always delivers. They make it easy, but they make it always easy, right?

Humans Still Create The Edge

Shep Hyken 7:32

Yeah, I'm gonna give you a scoop. I'm gonna tell you what I'm writing about right now for an upcoming article.

Charlotte Ward 7:37

Love a scoop. Love a scoop.

Shep Hyken 7:39

Well, it's really not big. I've been I've been thinking about this. Um, it used to be that technology was used to enhance the experience. And it seems to have become so important to companies. They think it's a great way to cost save. It's a great way to they think get people information faster and quicker. Like I said earlier, that it's great until it's not great, till it doesn't work. And what's happened is it used to be the accent to the human to enhance the experience. Now it's completely flipped. The human is used to enhance the digital experience. And here's the cool part. Are you ready for a secret?

Charlotte Ward 8:19

I'm listening.

Shep Hyken 8:20

The companies that figure this out are gonna realize that the human, the human experience that enhances the digital experience is the competitive advantage that's going to be needed to separate them from the competition. Because these competitors that are going in on digital and not creating the original human experience we all love, they're gonna miss out. So you can't replace it. I realize that there are people getting cut from all kinds of different departments because of AI. Their jobs are not eliminated 100%. When I say jobs, their job opportunities are not eliminated. It may be eliminated from that particular department or even from the company. But what's happening is there's a displacement. People are still able to go out and get jobs. They're not just getting the job that they were actually in yesterday or last week because there's companies that have found ways to do this. Even executives are finding that some of their jobs are being displaced. And those people all land on their feet. I'm not saying 100% in every major innovation that's ever happened from the beginning of time has displaced and eliminated jobs. This one seems to be a little bigger, but at the end, guess what? We're all going to find another way to make a living. The entrepreneurial boom that happened during COVID when so many people were laid off proves that people can go out and make a living if they decide to choose to do it on their own, or they can keep looking for the job that gets them that steady paycheck that they're comfortable with. Whatever they choose to do, there's probably something out there for them. But jobs are changing. And no doubt AI is making that happen. But we're mostly focused today on AI and the customer experience. So let's stay in that lane for a while.

Charlotte Ward 10:10

I I think that's a good shout. I will say I completely agree. And displacement, I'm just going to touch on this for a few seconds. I think it's such a great word because to your point, since the dawn of time, since the advent of the wheel, people have had to, people have had to readjust, people have had to find new jobs, people have had to find ways to engage with new technologies. And this is as true of people in the workplace as it is with customers. And and like, you know, there was a time when, you know, I I don't know, whatever his name was, Og was delivering something by hand on foot, and then Ug invented the wheel. I don't know.

Shep Hyken 10:51

But but you know you're right, you're right. And and so what happened to those delivery people? What happened to those described in the books? Yeah. You know, handwritten books were replaced with the Gutenberg press.

Charlotte Ward 11:04

100%. New jobs innovated, print publishers.

Shep Hyken 11:09

And you know, there's so many, there's so many innovative uh I read a book, uh, what was it called? Um Dan Sullivan wrote it probably 30 years ago, and it had to do with the a revolution that had to do with technology. I think it had something to do with the microchip. The microchip massively changed the way people do business and how they you know approach things. It's unbelievable. You know, when FedEx came along and was absolutely positively guaranteeing it by tomorrow, the the post office was freaking out, you know, and then what did fax machines do to the post office or even FedEx? And now what is email doing to all of that? And all of these companies are still finding ways, if they choose to be relevant, some are actually making pretty good money if they do it and manage it the right way.

Charlotte Ward 11:59

And and back to our initial points, if they make it always easy for their customers to engage with, then it becomes a a huge um uh accelerant for that that organization doing business, because but customers will increasingly want to do business with them. So so back to AI and the customer experience, as you so rightly called out, we should stick to. Um, the um the companies getting it right are the ones who are making it always easily, always easy, whether it's humans, whether it's AI, whether it's any other digital experience, it's always easy.

Phone Support Preferences By Generation

Charlotte Ward 12:35

Um, you know, Shep, I have a um when I'm hiring uh support agents, support engineers for my team, I have a couple of questions. I always ask them as part of the interview process. And I ask them to think about times they were customers rather than people delivering the service, rather than people supporting customers. And I asked them to tell, you know, that old tell me about time kind of question mechanic in interview process where I say, tell me about a time when I want them to describe a time when they had a really great customer experience and what made it so great, and a time they had a really bad customer experience, what made it awful and what could have rescued it. But but do you know on the on the really poor customer experience side, and I'm I'm citing this as an example because I experienced this this weekend myself. 85, 90% of the time it's cell phone network providers.

Shep Hyken 13:30

I'm sorry to say there's a problem. There's so many things that could go wrong in that business. I mean, you could be downstairs in a basement and not have a signal, and you're gonna blame it on the cell phone provider. You could have a uh you could be switching, you know, from a tower and you disconnect. Of course, that does probably tie into what it is, or who knows for many reasons. You know, here's the other thing. Most of the time there's a problem, a short uh like an outage of some kind. You don't know it until you absolutely need it.

Charlotte Ward 14:01

Very true. And because it's a phone, because you've got this device in your hand, it feels like your first port of call is to call the cell phone provider. And so often you end up in these nightmarish kind of phone systems that are either automated or at least I would, I would, because I'm trained well as a support person, uh, I actually appreciate a well-crafted AI experience that understands what I'm trying to do to navigate the phone tree, you know, um, rather than yes, no, yes. Um that that like a an organization that does that well, because you're on the phone, knows and has crafted that digital experience, even though it's voice, to make it always easy and to crucially drop me off to a human when it isn't clear or when I have a very nuanced request, right? And I think that that's for me, that's the um I think a lot of cell phone providers are in that transitionary period. Some of them, the one that I will always go to because they make it easy for me, uh, it has a great, very clearly AI-driven experience on the phone, even though eventually sometimes they do want to speak to a human. And the one that I never ever want to use again is the one where the phone tree is like, is it about this? Press one. No, and you say sorry, and they say I don't. Yeah, and I'm sorry, I didn't catch that no. You just said say it again. Yeah, yeah.

Shep Hyken 15:26

Yeah. So two things I want to touch on there. Number one is I work with a cell phone internet provider, cable provider, major player in the US over here, major, one of the biggest. And one of the things they do when you sign up for them is they ask you every possible way they can contact you. They want to know your Facebook page, they want to know your LinkedIn profile, they want to know your phone number, they want to know your email, they want to know everything. And this is

Proactive Updates That Calm Customers

Shep Hyken 15:53

why. When there's a problem, they will blast to every one of those channels to let you know there's a problem. And they tell you this so that you know that if I let's say it's you know, whether it's internet or phone, it's often the same company, and sometimes people have different companies they use for different reasons. But um, here's what happens: you get that notice, your cable is out in the area. There is an outage, it will be fixed in one hour. We'll give you an update in case it doesn't get fixed, and you feel good because knowledge is power. So being proactive, very cool. Number two, uh, this is something that's real important for every company to remember. We use uh we do research here in the US, it's consumer-based research. It matches the profile of the demographic of the US, which is not unlike where you are in the UK or many other advanced countries. I mean, it's people know what to expect. Here's what we ask: when you have a problem, would you prefer to use the phone or use technology like AI or some other digital experience? And it's really amazing to me that in the last five or six years the number has been consistent that seven out of ten people prefer the phone. Now, here's what's interesting older people are driving that statistic a little bit higher. Last year, 88% of baby boomers said, I want the phone. By the way, this year, some of them are catching up to the world of technology, only 80%. Last year, 51 or somewhere right around 50, some odd percent of it's right around half of Gen Z, the youngest generation said, I'll use the phone, which means the other half wants technology. And this year, that number went up to 60 percent. Oh, interesting. I want the phone. So more Gen Zers today want the phone than they did last year. And I think that part of it is they're defining problems differently. The older generation will jump to the phone for any reason where the younger generation says, if it's a real problem, I'd like to talk to somebody. Otherwise, if I've just got a question that's easy to get an answer to, I don't want to go on to a website, get a phone number, call it, wait on hold, authenticate myself with whatever information they need. And that's all before they finally say, okay, so what's the question? Right?

Charlotte Ward 18:18

That's so that's so that's so interesting. Like I wonder if there is, because in the support world, I'm thinking about those metrics around, you know, resolution rates and everything else, like uh cut how many, like our average handle time, for instance, how long it takes us to solve a problem. Well, uh my average handle time is going up. And the reason it's going up is because problems are more complex, because we're deflecting more. So I wonder if that's shifting that dynamic somewhat with even the younger generation.

Shep Hyken 18:47

If you take a look at the age of the person who's calling, your average handle time for an older customer is somewhat consistent as to what it was last year, the year before, and the year before. For the younger customer, it's getting longer. Because the younger customer is calling you for real problems. Yeah, right. The older customer is calling you because they've always called for anything for the last 30 or 40 years of their life.

Charlotte Ward 19:17

I can believe that. I mean, part of the the cell phone provider experience this weekend was for my dad. So, like, I can fully attest to like my dad wants to speak on the phone, he hates the phone tree, he hates So this this is this is interesting because what you just touched on there about, you know, that cell phone provider knows uh that the best thing they can do for their customers is effectively blast on all channels to say, this is what you'll be seeing right now, this is what you'll be experiencing right now here, and presumably building that narrative around this is what you can expect to happen next. And and that kind of deeply personalized experience across all channels. So they've they've put the effort in to learn about their individual customers up front, right?

Shep Hyken 19:59

Right, right. And knowledge is power. If you've ever been to an airport and there's a delayed flight, as soon as uh the person comes on and says, Let me tell you what's going on, and they give you that information, everybody's like, ah, now I know. Okay, so I'll be a little bit late. Some will panic because they have connections, but at least they have the knowledge to know they can go get that taken care of. Where without the knowledge, there's a very confused or in some cases angry. Uh, and I've watched customers get angry at gate agents at airports because the gate agent isn't proactive with information. If all they did was said, I know the plane's not here yet, I'm gonna give you an update every 15 minutes, and I'll let you know what I know. And we're in this together. Uh the uh the the anger reduces, the anxiety reduces, frustration. And sure, there's gonna be some people are gonna be like uptight about whether they're gonna catch the connection, get home in time for whatever it is they're getting home for, or to their meeting that they want to go to. So uh, but knowledge is power, be proactive with it.

Charlotte Ward 21:05

100%. Uh uh I have the yin to the to your yang statement there, which is the thing I often say is that silence kills trust. And and so in a world where your agents, whether they're at the front desk in an airport or on the phone, or even your AI agents, your AI response, if it doesn't have the information necessary to keep your customers informed at the right level about what ne what's going to happen next, what the situation is now, what's gonna happen next, what expectations we can set, your customers are potentially going to get pretty agitated, right? Even if they express it through, you know, in professional tones, um, or they're ranting and shaking a fist at uh some poor airline staff, like or somewhere in between. But but that idea that like we we expect our customers to just accept us at face value is kind of it's pretty old fashioned. Right. And I think I think this is where whether the agent is human or AI, like we need to kind of ensure that our customers are informed to the right level at the right time, in the right place, and that they they feel part of the journey. And whether that journey is AI or not, like that's crucial, isn't it?

Journey Mapping Moments Of Truth

Shep Hyken 22:22

A hundred percent. It's uh uh just make sure you understand your customers' journey well enough to recognize where to bring people in, where you can move to AI, truly understand every touch point and how it can be optimized, and in some cases, optimized with a backup plan for those that have an issue, a problem, or just don't feel like using your version of an optimized plan and understand it well enough to get it done. You know, journey mapping is uh is an old expression, at least now it's old, somewhat feeling uh you know antiquated. It's probably only been around for 20 or so years. But the power of understanding those touch points. I read a book in the 1980s, long, long time ago, by Jan Carlson, and I still talk about this concept today. I give him full credit for coming up with the idea of the moment of truth. Anytime a customer comes into contact with any aspect of a business, however remote they form an impression. He ran an airline, Scandinavian Airlines, and he would bring everybody into the hangar in every city they had a presence, and he would talk about this moment of truth concept because he believed the simplicity of understanding the touch points that every passenger, again, that's their word for customer, every passenger experiences, if managed well, it'll get them to fly back on the airline again. They were losing millions and millions of dollars every month because of a bad experience and customers weren't flying on them. And with this simple idea, he turned it around and he said the first touch point, it's when they make a reservation. They, the passenger. Then they check their bags on the day of departure. Maybe they do it outside at the curb, maybe they do it inside at the ticket counter. These are major touch points, major opportunities to form impressions of the airline. And then every interaction along the way, and it could be as something as simple as uh a flight attendant walking by and smiling or waving, even though they're not on the same flight, but it adds to the experience. It it just it's a tiny little connection. And at the end of the trip, if everything's been taken care of, and operationally everything worked, but on the people-to-people side interactions, if they worked as well, guess what? The customer says, in the famous words of the Austrian philosopher Arnold Schwarzenegger, they say, I'll be back.

Charlotte Ward 24:43

Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. Yeah, I you know what? I uh I'm gonna draw back to my uh cell phone provider example from the weekend. I moved my father over to the cell phone provider that I trust and the and the one that I will always go back to, largely because of those touch points, largely because of the experience that I've had over years and years of building trust, of all them always solving my problems, making it easy. And yes, uh unfortunately I don't see a cell phone, you know, customer service agent smiling at me in real life very much. But you know what, they always meet my needs, and when I do speak to a human, they are lovely. Uh they un they're understanding, they know that I've been through the AI bit of the experience already, and I do have to to the point we made before, like a more complex request, right? Um but I am also that well-trained customer. I do also understand that the getting there isn't necessarily getting to the human isn't necessarily the end point, actually. I do have just a problem to solve. And so the cell phone provider I keep going back to, I get a sense that they're like very AI forward in their service delivery. Whereas the one that I kind of strong armed my dad into leaving at the weekend, like they're very, very phone tree, like uh it's a very archaic like service delivery.

Shep Hyken 26:11

They force you into their phone trees are it's not that's not AI.

Charlotte Ward 26:15

Yes.

Integrate Systems And Cut Time To Happiness

Shep Hyken 26:17

It is and it is, and it's not modern day AI. Part of the problem companies are having is they're stacking technologies because they want to try to keep using the old as long as they possibly can. And the problem with that is you know, the companies that constantly reinvest to upgrade to give people the best experience they can, regardless of how old the technology is, is important. So as the top techno, I mean, I can't imagine what it's going to be like next, but right now it's so inexpensive. And if you I realize you may have spent a lot of money on something four or five years ago, but if you didn't invest your technology stack or not even a stack, just the technology in a company that allows you to integrate other technologies into the same technology that they have, the same solution, huge mistake. You know, we walk into contact centers and we see multiple screens up with lots of different programs going on at the same time. And that's to use this I hate the term siloed effect, but that's what it is. This program is with all the social media uh information that we're getting. So when people reach out on social, this is the one I have to use. This is the CRM that we use to deal with all the phone calls. This one over here is my text messaging app uh that I'm doing. It's like, why do you have three completely separate programs? Now, I do believe you can have separate tabs in the same program. Those can be open, but it all integrates into one place. So if I'm talking to you on the phone, I'll say, you know, I see yesterday you reached out to us uh on our messaging app and you were talking to one of her AI agents. I don't believe many customers know what the term AI agent means, but I see that you were trying to get this taken care of with her self-service solution. Is that why you're calling today? Yes, I am so frustrated. Good news for you. I'm gonna work with you to make sure. I remember my iPhone. When I bought the Apple iPhone, I came in from the Blackberry and I was so comfortable with my Blackberry, but I couldn't get the technology on the iPhone wasn't as intuitive to me as it is to others for some reason. And I'll never forget calling saying, I am so frustrated with this thing. I can't get it to do this, that it seems every time I do it, it's a different way. And he says, sir, I'll take as much time as it takes today for us to get off the phone and you to be willing to jump in front of a bus to save your iPhone.

Charlotte Ward 28:50

Wow.

Shep Hyken 28:51

I said, I will jump in front of the bus as long as the bus is going backwards.

Charlotte Ward 28:56

I think that's fair compromise, to be honest. You know, I uh I I love that like the the reference you made there to silos, and I think this is just something worth touching on finally, is is silos are prevalent and they're often driven by the technology platforms and the investments made at different stages of maturity. And um, I I I use the word designing somewhat, you know, flippantly here. Designing a customer experience or delivering or tooling up your agents to speak to your customers. To your point, it's often three separate things. I've got to go over here when I'm dealing with this, I've got to go over here when I'm talking in that way, um, and in this channel I'm doing something else, you know, and those those those digital experiences, the platforms at the back end, often don't connect to each other. They are often, there's like a fracture between the customer information internally. And that really, really manifests in the customer experience, doesn't it? Because what you get to your point is customers speaking, like probably relieved at long last to speak to a human by this point.

Shep Hyken 30:04

And yet what you wouldn't be that way.

Charlotte Ward 30:06

No, I 100% agree. Like, if you're operating like, and and I think this is this is actually where it's worth calling out that you should treat your AI agents in the same way as you treat your human agents, you should empower them with the right information, you should carry over the personalized nature of the experience, the context, where your customer is right now, and everything else. But so many organizations don't.

Shep Hyken 30:30

I don't know if the technology is quite there to do that yet. So the idea that we're gonna empower AI agents, that's what you want them to do. You want them to handle the information so the customer doesn't have to talk to a human unless they have to. And again, I have to say this again and again. If you don't, you know, it it you have to make it easy to talk to a human, or else the idea behind that is companies that are totally deflecting are losing customers. Everyone that's tried it is going back and they're actually trying to get more engagement because really the human-to-human interaction is where the relationship is built. I trust a company if everything always works every single time, but the day it doesn't, I can't talk to a human, I no longer trust them. And I know one of the things you wanted to talk about was AI first, but not AI only. Push the customer to using your self-service solutions. That's okay. I'm buying into that. I've been buying into it since really since the airlines decided to try to get us to use online check-in or online booking of reservations. They gave us an incentive to do it. They said, try it, go online, click around. And if you book your your ticket online, we'll give you 500 bonus points. Well, I'm gonna try it. I want my 500 bonus points. So I do it, it works, it's easy, and I'm never gonna go back to using the a reservationist on on an 800 number. That's what we I don't know if they call it that there.

Charlotte Ward 32:03

I know you may, yeah.

Shep Hyken 32:04

But you know what I mean, the toll-free number. Yeah. But the point is, I know there's a backup if I need it. And that's what I do. So um, and I love the fact that, and as much as I would hate, I hate getting an email or a text message that says, I'm sorry your flight is delayed. We've protected you on the next flight. If that doesn't work, here's some other options. If that doesn't work, here's a phone number. I don't want to get that message, but if that's the way it's handled, I'm pretty darn happy. Because actually, that way of handling it is probably going to get me on that next flight faster than if I made the phone call myself. I have something I refer to as time to happiness. And that's the moment I decide that I want to get help, that I have an issue, that I have a question, from the moment I decide to reach out to the company, even if I've been unhappy before, maybe I've let it fester for a week before I finally had the time to call, which that's the real time to happiness. And and the person on the other end of the phone who answers that call needs to understand when I reached out to get help may not have been my been my problem really started. But from that moment till the time it's resolved, that's time to happiness.

Charlotte Ward 33:18

Yeah. Yeah, I I agree. I I I also think to your point, I'm so glad you jumped on when I was kind of expressing that relief that we sometimes feel when we finally speak to a human. That kind of I've been desperately stabbing at the phone or some online form or something, and like, oh my God, I'm so pleased to speak to you, a human being at last, right? Uh, I think that uh I think if we can avoid that, we've got we've hit the digital experience pretty well at that point, and you've made it easy to speak to a human. And and you know, to your to your um Arnold Arnie philosophy, I'll be back, right? I can't put on the accent. I'm not gonna put on the accent.

Shep Hyken 33:57

I'll be back.

Charlotte Ward 33:58

I'll be you can do it.

Shep Hyken 33:59

You have to put on the sunglasses. I have those somewhere here. They're sunglasses like Arnold had in the turn.

Charlotte Ward 34:05

That's an image for next time. Shep, it's been so lovely to have you join me. Thank you so much for spending this half hour or so with me today. I've really appreciated it and really enjoyed it. I knew we'd dig into this whole kind of the human element around AI and how they coexist and keep customers happy. I knew you'd have some uh some strong opinions there. Um, I feel enriched for it. Uh, thank you so much.

Shep Hyken 34:28

Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Charlotte Ward 34:30

Uh and now, Shep, I might ask you just will you be back? Would you come and talk to me some other time in the future? I won't commit you to it. I know you're very better. Thank you. I'll take that. I'll take that. Accent and all. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Shep Hyken 34:45

Thank you. Cheers.

Charlotte Ward 34:49

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash three zero seven for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.