The Effortless Experience

1. Customer service drives disloyalty more than loyalty

Any customer service interaction is four times more likely to drive disloyalty than to drive loyalty.

Conventional wisdom challenged: Most companies believe that customer service is an opportunity to delight customers and build loyalty. However, research shows that service interactions are far more likely to make customers disloyal. This is because customers typically contact service when something has gone wrong, and these negative experiences have an outsized impact on loyalty.

Key drivers of disloyalty:

• Having to contact the company multiple times
• Being treated generically
• Having to repeat information
• Perceived additional effort to resolve issues
• Being transferred or bounced around

To mitigate disloyalty, companies should focus on reducing customer effort rather than trying to exceed expectations. Consistently meeting customer needs in a low-effort way is more impactful than occasional moments of delight.

2. Reduce customer effort instead of delighting customers

The role of customer service is to mitigate disloyalty by reducing customer effort.

Effort trumps delight: While many companies strive to delight customers, research shows that reducing effort is far more effective at building loyalty. Customers don't necessarily want to be wowed - they simply want their issues resolved quickly and easily.

Components of customer effort:

• Rational effort: Number of interactions, transfers, repeating information, etc.
• Emotional effort: Frustration, uncertainty, perceived difficulty

Reducing effort means minimizing both the actual work customers must do (rational effort) and how difficult the experience feels (emotional effort). This requires streamlining processes and also managing customer perceptions through effective communication. By focusing on making interactions easy rather than delightful, companies can more consistently deliver experiences that build loyalty.

3. Self-service is preferred, but channel switching causes problems

The challenge lies in getting today's customer to avoid channel switching from self-service to a live phone call—and in doing so, avoiding the cost and disloyalty that comes with it.

Self-service first: Contrary to what many companies believe, most customers actually prefer self-service options over speaking to a live agent. This holds true across demographics and even for complex issues. Companies should prioritize making self-service channels effective and easy to use.

Channel switching hurts loyalty: When customers start in self-service but end up having to call for live support, it creates a high-effort experience that damages loyalty. To prevent this:

• Guide customers to the best channel for their specific issue
• Simplify language and navigation on self-service platforms
• Proactively offer relevant information to prevent future contacts

By keeping customers in their preferred self-service channels, companies can reduce costs while also delivering lower-effort experiences that build loyalty.

4. Resolve adjacent issues to prevent unnecessary callbacks

Customers who had their issue resolved often call back for reasons indirectly related to the original issue.

Think beyond the stated issue: Many callbacks occur not because the original issue wasn't resolved, but because of related "adjacent" issues that the customer didn't anticipate. To prevent these, service reps should proactively address likely follow-up issues.

Next issue avoidance tactics:

• Map out common follow-up issues for each interaction type
• Train reps to anticipate and address these proactively
• Send follow-up emails with relevant information
• Prompt customers to take related actions in self-service

By resolving both stated and unstated needs, companies can dramatically reduce repeat contacts. This improves the customer experience while also lowering costs. Shifting from a narrow "first contact resolution" focus to a broader "next issue avoidance" approach is key to reducing overall customer effort.

5. Engineer positive customer experiences through language

Effort is one-third "do," two-thirds "feel."

Perception matters more than reality: Research shows that customers' perception of effort has a much bigger impact on loyalty than the actual work required. This means companies can significantly improve the customer experience by managing how interactions feel, even if the steps involved don't change.

Experience engineering techniques:

• Use positive language (e.g. what you can do vs. what you can't)
• Anchor expectations by comparing to worse alternatives
• Demonstrate advocacy for the customer
• Tailor communication style to customer personality

These techniques allow reps to shape how customers interpret interactions, even in situations where the outcome isn't ideal. By focusing on the emotional experience, companies can reduce perceived effort and mitigate disloyalty even when actual processes can't be changed.

6. Empower frontline staff to exercise judgment and control

In order to get control, you've actually got to give control.

Trust enables performance: Most companies try to tightly control frontline staff through scripts, metrics like average handle time, and rigid quality assurance processes. However, research shows that reps perform better when given more autonomy to make judgment calls in customer interactions.

Keys to unlocking frontline performance:

• Demonstrate trust in rep judgment
• Ensure reps understand and align with company goals
• Foster strong peer support networks

By creating an environment that enables reps to exercise control and make decisions, companies empower them to deliver more personalized, lower-effort experiences. This shift requires rethinking traditional management approaches but can dramatically improve both customer and employee satisfaction.

7. Measure and systematically reduce customer effort

Measuring effort using the CES survey metric, when coupled with a more in-depth audit like the CEA, creates a clear picture not just of how you're doing when it comes to effort reduction but, more important, specific actions you can take to improve it.

Customer Effort Score (CES): This survey question measures how easy it was for customers to get their issue resolved. It's a stronger predictor of loyalty than traditional metrics like customer satisfaction.

Systematic effort reduction process:

1. Measure CES across channels and interactions
2. Conduct in-depth audits to identify effort drivers
3. Map the full customer journey to spot problem areas
4. Analyze root causes of high-effort experiences
5. Implement targeted improvements
6. Track impact on CES and loyalty metrics

By systematically measuring and reducing effort across all touchpoints, companies can drive meaningful improvements in customer loyalty. This data-driven approach allows organizations to prioritize the most impactful changes.

8. Coach, don't just train, to drive behavior change

Behavior change can only be learned on the job, and supervisors must actively, and with laserlike focus, apply coaching to help reps develop and hone these new skills.

Coaching outperforms training: While most companies rely heavily on classroom training, research shows that ongoing coaching has a much bigger impact on frontline performance. This is especially true for nuanced skills like reducing customer effort.

Keys to effective coaching:

• Focus on integrated, on-the-job coaching rather than scheduled sessions
• Have reps practice effort reduction techniques in real interactions
• Provide immediate feedback and guidance
• Use actual customer interactions as examples
• Empower supervisors to coach frequently

Shifting resources from formal training to ongoing coaching allows reps to develop and refine effort reduction skills in context. This approach leads to faster adoption and more sustainable behavior change compared to traditional training methods.

Last updated: August 9, 2024