The teaser on the cover of The Effortless Experience promises “a business detective story…” Who doesn’t like a business book with a few bodies piled up in the first chapter? I’m in.
Alas, no detectives, bodies, forensics or car chases here, but all is not lost; this is a cracking good read about customer loyalty and it’s one marketers should pay attention to.
This is by Matthew Dixon, who wrote a terrific book for Sales Squirrels called The Challenger Sale, which I also recommend. Here, Dixon has a look at why, despite decades of study, investment and public humiliation, we still can’t seem to get customer loyalty right.
It turns out, it has to do with effort. Now we marketers know that even the most simple activities can come with a significant calorie burn when it comes to actually executing them. The same is true in your Customer Abuse department. The more energy or effort your customer has to expend in their interactions with you, the more likely they are to head elsewhere.
Customers, it seems, are more than happy to try to solve their problem themselves, but if they find it frustrating or time-consuming, they are going to pick up the phone. The minute that happens, your risk of losing them goes way, way up. We’ll come back to why this matters to marketers in a minute.
We have talked in this space before about the need to stop measuring how quickly we can flush a customer call and start measuring how helpful our CSRs actually are. This book bears that out and provides a very good blueprint for changing how your service delivery is measured.
Dixon suggests replacing that clunky old CSAT score with a Customer Experience Score (CES). This metric, he has found, is a much more accurate predictor of churn than straight-up customer satisfaction numbers. Even good old Net Promoter scores, are less effective at spotting the runners. Chapter Six is a very detailed, Geek-tastic look at how CES is defined and measured.
Chapter Seven follows up with a general guide for getting things changed, beginning with how CSRs are managed. Coaching, it seems, is better than training and produces a rep with the judgement, confidence and autonomy to solve a problem at first contact. Indeed, empowered reps are one of the four principles of low-effort service. Minimizing channel switching, reducing subsequent calls by identifying future issues and trusting employees to manage calls, rather than read scripts are the others. The American Express case study in this chapter is worth a read too.
Now back to why this matters for marketers. We know that marketing can throw the service department under the bus with exaggerated claims about service and how much we love customers. In terms of effort, we probably don’t do much to help when we bury phone numbers on our website, design impossible-to-follow self-service pages and mostly ignore the customer experience in favour of the prospective customer experience.
A great to-do from this book for all of us is to take a look at how long it actually takes a customer to find an answer, update information, pay a bill or other routine thing on our websites. Where are the places that will frustrate them to the point where they call in? Where do we make them work unnecessarily hard to understand something? Where are we using jargon, acronyms and internal language instead of communicating clearly?
This is a quick read and an easy-to-follow style, with helpful summaries at the end of each chapter. If you’re wondering about whether B2B makes and appearance, the answer is yes, and the ideas here may be more relevant in our space.
“In fact, for those customers who feel significant time pressure in their daily lives, customer effort was more than twice as accurate a predictor of their level of company loyalty than CSAT. This finding is particularly relevant for B2B companies, whose customers often face tremendous time pressures at work every day…”
There is also a bit of good news for those of us who have been a little suspicious about this whole notion of “delighting” customers. It doesn’t work. They don’t care. And if you screw up the service, they won’t remember that you once send them a keyring.
Related Posts:
Stop Beating Your CSAT to Death
Retention Disorders or Churning is for Butter
Fight Them in the Cafe
BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
or follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
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