ARLINGTON, Va., Oct. 16, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Five years of
research reveals that delighting customers during service, support
or other customer care interactions is no more likely to lead to
higher repeat sales, share of wallet or positive word-of-mouth than
simply meeting their expectations. According to "The Effortless
Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty,"
a new book from leading member-based advisory firm CEB (NYSE:
EXBD), a customer service strategy built around delighting
customers is doomed to fail 84 percent of the time, on average.
Instead, "The Effortless Experience" makes the case that companies
should focus on reducing a customer's perceived effort – what
customers feel they have to do in order to resolve their issue – to
ensure those customers remain loyal. In fact, CEB research shows
that 94 percent of customers who have a low-effort service
experience will buy from that same company again.
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"Today's customer puts a lot of value on how well a company
delivers on its basic promises, solves day-to-day problems and
helps them avoid future issues. Companies underestimate the benefit
of simply meeting these customer expectations, because it goes
against the conventional wisdom of 'above and beyond,'" said
co-author Matthew Dixon, executive director, CEB. "To build
loyalty, companies need to actually think like the customer. This
means stop thinking 'exceed expectations,' and start thinking 'make
it easy.'"
Over the past few years, a new battleground for customer loyalty
has emerged. Instead of attempting to positively impact loyalty,
the more effective strategy is to mitigate disloyalty by making
service interactions easy. In fact, 96 percent of customers who
endure a high-effort experience with an organization report that
they are more likely to be disloyal, compared to only 6 percent of
customers who had low-effort interactions.
How to Create an 'Effortless Experience'
In "The
Effortless Experience," the authors detail specific obstacles that
companies take for granted, but frustrate customers on a regular
basis. The good news for companies who aren't currently focused on
reducing customer effort is that CEB has established a service
blueprint, identifying solutions that can be readily implemented to
help boost loyalty. Some of the near-term approaches include:
- Simplify Self-Serve Options – Make self-serve options
simple and help guide customers to the option that best suits their
need and resolves the issue quickly.
- Help Customers Avoid Future Issues – Equip customer
service teams with knowledge about commonly occurring downstream
issues so they can help customers resolve future problems during
the first interaction.
- Coach Reps to Anticipate Emotional Reactions – Encourage
reps to use specific, targeted language to guide customer
interactions to a more appealing end result; those who do generate
up to 80 percent better quality ratings and 75 percent lower effort
ratings.
- Give Control to Get Control – Empower reps to exercise
their own judgment to deliver the desired service experience for
each individual customer.
For more information on creating a low-effort service experience
or to purchase a copy of "The Effortless Experience," visit our
website and join the discussion on LinkedIn. "The Effortless
Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty"
was created based on research from surveys with more than 125,000
customers, 5,000 service reps and 100 companies. The groundbreaking
idea, which was first brought to market by CEB in 2010 and
published by the Harvard Business Review, has been expanded
to include new insights and solutions for reducing customer effort
and creating a low-effort service organization, as well as a new
version of CEB's much-publicized metric, the Customer Effort
Score.
The book, authored by Matthew
Dixon, Nick Toman and
Rick DeLisi, is published by
Portfolio, a division of Penguin Group USA.
About CEB
CEB, the leading member-based advisory
company, equips more than 10,000 organizations around the globe
with insights, tools and actionable solutions to transform
enterprise performance. By combining advanced research and
analytics with best practices from member companies, CEB helps
leaders realize outsized returns by more effectively managing
talent, information, customers and risk. Member companies include
more than 85% of the Fortune 500, half the Dow Jones Asian Titans,
and nearly 85% of the FTSE 100. More at cebglobal.com
SOURCE The Corporate Executive Board Company