When Companies Want to Reduce Costs and Improve the Customer Experience, “Delight” Doesn’t Pay
21 Juin 2010 - 5:30PM
Business Wire
The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) (NASDAQ: EXBD), today
challenged conventional customer-service wisdom by revealing that
it doesn’t pay to delight a customer. After years of focus on the
“above and beyond” service mentality, research from the Customer
Contact Council, a division of CEB, indicates that most customers
only seek a satisfactory solution to an issue, and that companies
themselves are actually artificially raising expectations in their
efforts to over-satisfy them. The research also suggests, and CEB
advises, that reducing the level of effort a customer exerts in the
service channel is a more effective and lucrative path to customer
loyalty.
In fact, 96 percent of customers who put forth high effort to
resolve their issues are more disloyal—an eye-opening number when
companies consider that 59 percent of customers report
moderate-to-high perceived additional effort in a service
interaction. CEB’s research found that, in aggregate, customer
service interactions are nearly four times more likely to lead to
disloyalty than loyalty. For companies seeking to mitigate
disloyalty, reducing customer effort—not delighting the customer-is
the greatest lever the contact center can pull.
“Everyone is talking about loyalty—how to build it, what it
means, and how to monetize it—but many companies are operating
under false pretences,” said Matt Dixon, managing director,
Corporate Executive Board. “There’s lots of uncertainty out there
and we wanted to help our members sift through what really matters
in customer service. What we found was surprising and really
challenged conventional wisdom. Now, when customers ask us how to
best delight their customers, we say don’t—reduce their effort
instead.”
The Customer Effort Score & Customer Effort Audit
To help members assess and reduce the amount of effort their
customers were exerting in the service experience and ultimately
enhance customer loyalty, CEB developed the Customer Effort Score.
Rather than a complex algorithm, the Customer Effort Score is a
simple question that service operations can use as a loyalty
indicator in the service channel: “How much effort did you
personally have to put forth to handle your request?”
The difference between the Customer Effort Score and other
well-established metrics such as Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) or
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is that it operates effectively on the
transactional level and better captures the disloyalty effect of
service interactions. CEB’s research showed that the Customer
Effort Score out-performed both NPS and CSAT in predicting the
loyalty impact of an individual service interaction.
“We like the Customer Effort Score in the transactional
customer-service environment because it gives a more immediate and
actionable measure,” Dixon added, “but this is not a new ‘ultimate
question.’ We believe that other metrics, particularly NPS, are
excellent indicators at the company level, but they don’t measure
individual service interaction impact or really get to disloyalty
in the way that the Customer Effort Score does. The key take-away
here is in order to build loyalty, companies need to stop thinking
‘exceed expectations’ and start thinking ‘make it easy.’ ”
Companies that want greater insight into the kind of effort they
are imposing on their customers—and what they can do to reduce
it—can download and complete the Customer Effort Audit.
In addition to providing insight into how best to reduce
customer effort, the research findings, encapsulated in “Shifting
the Loyalty Curve: Mitigating Disloyalty by Reducing Customer
Effort,” can help service-oriented companies:
- Understand the drivers of
customer loyalty and disloyalty;
- Provide greater clarity around
front-line orientation; and
- Head-off large,
“delight-oriented” investments and direct resources to
higher-return projects.
Methodology
To arrive at the findings, The Corporate Executive Board
conducted extensive qualitative analysis to determine key loyalty
drivers in the service channel and surveyed a sample of nearly
75,000 customers globally across multiple industries.
For more information on how to reduce customer effort and build
loyalty or to complete the Customer Effort Audit, visit
www.executiveboard.com/ccc-customer-effort. To learn about the
Customer Contact Council, visit www.ccc.executiveboard.com.
About The Corporate Executive Board
The Corporate Executive Board Company drives faster, more
effective decision-making among the world's leading executives and
business professionals. As the premier, network-based knowledge
resource, it provides them with the authoritative and timely
guidance needed to excel in their roles, take decisive action and
improve company performance. Powered by a member network that spans
over 50 countries and represents more than 85% of Fortune 500, The
Corporate Executive Board offers the unique research insights along
with an integrated suite of members-only tools and resources that
enable the world's most successful organizations to deliver
superior business outcomes. For more information, visit
www.exbd.com.
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