Dixon Matthew - The effortless experience : conquering the new battleground for customer loyalty

Praise for THE EFFORTLESS EXPERIENCE

Driving down customer effort results in pushing up brand loyalty, right along with sales.

DANIEL F. BALISTIERRI,

vice president, Global Service & Experience, MasterCard

Almost effortless reading, the pragmatic approach of the authors is just what we need to help us grapple with this global opportunity.

DAVID THOMPSON,

managing director, Fusion Contact Centre Services

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Dixon, Matthew, 1972

The effortless experience : conquering the new battleground for customer loyalty / Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-698-13758-5

1. Customer ralations. 2. Customer loyalty. I. Toman, Nick. II. DeLisi, Rick. III. Title

HF5415.5.D576 2013

658.812dc23 2013017449

To the members of CEB around the world, who challenge us every day to deliver insights worthy of their time and attention

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
Blinded by Delight

APPENDIX A
Issue-to-Channel-Mapping Tool

APPENDIX B
Toolkit for Issue Resolution

APPENDIX C
Negative Language Toolkit for Trainers

APPENDIX D
Customer Effort Score v2.0 Starter Kit

APPENDIX E
Customer Effort AssessmentSample Survey Questions

APPENDIX F
Customer Effort Audit

FOREWORD

On July 16, 2012, Shaea Labus, a Zappos customer service representative, took a call from a customer named Lisa. Their conversation started with shoes and broadened out to other areas of life: movies and favorite foods and more. They talked and talked and talked some more. At one point, Shaea took a bathroom break and came back to the phone; helpful colleagues brought her food. In total, their conversation lasted nine hours and thirty-seven minutes. Sometimes people just need to call and talk, explained another Zappos rep.

In a North Carolina Nordstrom, a security guard spotted a woman crawling around on the floor, frantically looking for something. Shed lost the diamond from her engagement ring. The guard and two other employees joined the search, and after a long, fruitless combing of the area, they finally discovered the diamond buried deep inside the bag of a vacuum cleaner.

One clear evening at the Four Seasons in Kapalua, Maui, a bartender overheard a honeymooning couple talking about how lovely the moon looked. The next morning, someone knocked on the door of their suite. To their shock, it was a NASA administrator, holding up two space suits. Guess whos taking our space shuttle for a ride today? he said, smiling. Better bring a bag for the moon rocks.

Okay, I made that last one up.

The other two stories are true, though. And youve probably heard many more like them. We live in a golden age of customer service, an era when many customer service leaders say explicitly that their goal is to delight the customer. (Parenthetically, delight the customer is a truly odd-sounding phrase to have caught on in our sober business world. Should we also aspire to mesmerize our employees and titillate our vendors?)

The idea, of course, is that customer service operations should aspire to provide superlative serviceservice that is so good, so over-the-top that its surprising and memorable. Delightful.

Its a worthy goal. But what if its dead wrong?

What if, in fact, these viral stories of delightful service have served as a siren song for customer service leaders, luring them away from a more sensible and effective mission?

There are times when stories stick too wellwhen they are so compelling that they distort our thinking. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of people being discovered on YouTube. A few years ago, Neal Schon, the lead guitarist of the band Journey, came across a video of a Filipino named Arnel Pineda, who was singing Journey cover songs. Pineda was so mind-bogglingly good that he was invited to be Journeys new lead singer. Another YouTube discovery involved a young Canadian singer named Justin Bieber. (Somehow I suspect youve heard that one.)

These YouTube tales have everything we crave in a story: likable heroes who make it big. The drama of unexpected discovery. The emotion of a rags-to-riches tale. But we must be careful not to confuse a great story with a great strategy. The fact that Justin Bieber was discovered online does not mean that a budding young rapper should blow his savings producing YouTube videos. Thats lottery-ticket logic. (Someone has to win, why not me?)

Similarly, the fact that the public loves sticky customer service stories does not mean that customer service leaders should gear up their departments to deliver them. Its not so much that delivering these stories is improbable, in the way that becoming a YouTube sensation is improbable. Certainly any customer service rep could be trained to stay on the phone for nine hours. (Whats your five-digit zip code? Thank you, Ms. Barkley. Now, lets start with your childhood.)

Rather, its that delighting customers is an inspirational but potentially misguided goal. Most companies are nothing like Nordstrom or Zappos, which bet their brands on service. Do we really need our credit card companies or utilities trying to delight us? (Personally, Id settle for not having to repeat aloud the very same account number that I just punched into the phone eight seconds prior.)

Maybe customer service should be less about offensebending over backwards to please customersand more about defense, in the sense of preventing frustration and delay. What if the Holy Grail of service isnt customer delight but customer reliefthe simple relaxing of the shoulders that comes from having your problem handled quickly and smoothly?

In the pages ahead, youll follow a business detective story, in which cherished truths about customer service are systematically investigatedand frequently debunked. The Effortless Experience is what every business book should be like: stuffed with practical advice, well supported by research, and written in a way that will keep you eagerly flipping the pages.

Along the way, youll find out the solution to the mega-mysteryshould customer service departments aim for delight or relief?and also encounter lots of fascinating mini-mysteries like these:

• What irritates customers more, being transferred or being forced to repeat information?
• What happened when Linksys stopped offering customer service via e-mail? Did costs go up or down? Did people switch to phone or self-service?