The idea that companies must “delight” their customers has become so entrenched that managers rarely examine it. But ask yourself this: How often does someone patronize a company specifically because of its over-the-top service? You can probably think of a few examples, such as the traveller who makes a point of returning to a hotel with a particularly attentive staff. But you probably can’t come up with many.
Now ask yourself: How often do consumers cut companies lose because of terrible service? All the time. They exact revenge on airlines that lose their bags, cable providers whose technicians keep them waiting, cellular companies whose reps put them on permanent hold, and dry cleaners who don’t understand what “rush order” means.
Consumers’ impulse to punish bad service—at least more readily than to reward delightful service—plays out dramatically in both phone-based and self-service interactions, which are most companies’ largest customer service channels. In those settings, research shows, loyalty has a lot more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic, even plain-vanilla promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be. Yet most companies have failed to realize this and pay dearly in terms of wasted investments and lost customers.
Two critical findings emerged that should affect every company’s customer service strategy. First, delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to solve their problem—does. Second, acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn.
According to conventional wisdom, customers are more loyal to firms that go above and beyond. But research shows that exceeding their expectations during service interactions (for example, by offering a refund, a free product, or a free service) makes customers only marginally more loyal than simply meeting their needs.
Although customer service can do little to increase loyalty, it can (and typically does) do a great deal to undermine it. Customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal than loyal.
We buy from a company because it delivers quality products, great value, or a compelling brand. More often than not, we leave one because it fails to deliver on customer service.
Make It Easy
Telling reps to exceed customers’ expectations is apt to yield confusion, wasted time and effort, and costly giveaways.
What exactly does “make it easy” mean? Simply: Remove obstacles.
Customers resent having to contact the company repeatedly (or be transferred) to resolve an issue, repeating information, and switching from one service channel to another (for instance, needing to call after trying unsuccessfully to solve a problem through the website).
The immediate mission is clear: Corporate leaders must focus their service organizations on mitigating disloyalty by reducing customer effort. But service managers fretting about how to reengineer their contact centres—departments built on a foundation of delighting the customer—should consider this: A massive shift is underway in terms of customers’ service preferences. Although most companies believe that customers overwhelmingly prefer live phone service to self-service, our most recent data show that customers are, in fact, indifferent. This is an important tipping point and probably presages the end of phone-based service as the primary channel for customer service interactions. For enterprising service managers, it presents an opportunity to rebuild their organizations around self-service and, in the process, to put reducing customer effort firmly at the core, where it belongs. Better Customer Relations Insights by Harvard Business Review
