What Kind Of Sinage Can You Have To Tell Customers We Are Not A Fast Service
Reprint: R1007L The notion that companies must go above and beyond in their customer service activities is so entrenched that managers rarely examine it. Only a written report of more than 75,000 people interacting with contact-center representatives or using cocky-service channels found that over-the-top efforts make fiddling deviation: All customers really want is a simple, quick solution to their trouble. The Corporate Executive Board'due south Dixon and colleagues describe five loyalty-building tactics that every visitor should prefer: Reduce the need for echo calls by anticipating and dealing with related downstream issues; arm reps to address the emotional side of customer interactions; minimize the need for customers to switch service channels; elicit and apply feedback from disgruntled or struggling customers; and focus on problem solving, non speed. The authors also introduce the Customer Effort Score and show that information technology is a better predictor of loyalty than customer satisfaction measures or the Net Promoter Score. And they make available to readers a related diagnostic tool, the Customer Effort Inspect. They conclude that nosotros are reaching a tipping point that may presage the cease of the phone as the primary aqueduct for service interactions—and that managers therefore have an opportunity to rebuild their service organizations and put reducing customer effort firmly at the core, where it belongs.
The Idea in Brief
Conventional wisdom holds that to increase loyalty, companies must "delight" customers by exceeding service expectations. A large-scale study of contact-heart and cocky-service interactions, nevertheless, finds that what customers really want (just rarely get) is just a satisfactory solution to their service issue.
Reps should focus on reducing the effort customers must make. Doing so increases the likelihood that they volition return to the company, increase the corporeality they spend in that location, and speak positively (and not negatively) about information technology—in other words, that they'll get more than loyal.
To meet customers' expectations, reps should conceptualize and head off the need for follow-upwardly calls, address the emotional side of interactions, minimize the need for customers to switch service channels, listen to and learn from disgruntled customers, and focus on problem solving, not speed.
The thought 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 visitor specifically because of its over-the-acme service? You can probably think of a few examples, such as the traveler who makes a betoken of returning to a hotel that has a especially attentive staff. Simply you probably can't come up upward with many.
Now ask yourself: How oft do consumers cut companies loose because of terrible service? All the time. They exact revenge on airlines that lose their bags, cable providers whose technicians continue them waiting, cellular companies whose reps put them on permanent hold, and dry cleaners who don't understand what "rush order" ways.
Consumers' impulse to punish bad service—at least more readily than to advantage delightful service—plays out dramatically in both telephone-based and self-service interactions, which are virtually companies' largest customer service channels. In those settings, our research shows, loyalty has a lot more than to do with how well companies deliver on their bones, even patently-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.
To examine the links between customer service and loyalty, the Customer Contact Council, a division of the Corporate Executive Board, conducted a report of more than than 75,000 people who had interacted over the telephone with contact-center representatives or through self-service channels such equally the spider web, vox prompts, chat, and email. Nosotros also held hundreds of structured interviews with customer service leaders and their functional counterparts in big companies throughout the world. (For more detail, run across the sidebar "Nearly the Enquiry.") Our enquiry addressed three questions:
- How of import is customer service to loyalty?
- Which customer service activities increase loyalty, and which don't?
- Can companies increment loyalty without raising their customer service operating costs?
Two critical findings emerged that should touch every company'south client service strategy. First, delighting customers doesn't build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does. Second, acting deliberately on this insight tin can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn.
Trying Too Hard
Co-ordinate to conventional wisdom, customers are more loyal to firms that become above and beyond. But our research shows that exceeding their expectations during service interactions (for example, past offering a refund, a gratis product, or a complimentary service such every bit expedited shipping) makes customers only marginally more loyal than simply meeting their needs.
For leaders who cut their teeth in the service section, this is an alarming finding. What contact heart doesn't take a wall plastered with letters and eastward-mails from customers praising the actress piece of work that service reps went to on their behalf? Indeed, 89 of the 100 client service heads we surveyed said that their main strategy is to exceed expectations. But despite these Herculean—and costly—efforts, 84% of customers told united states that their expectations had non been exceeded during their near contempo interaction.
One reason for the focus on exceeding expectations is that fully 80% of client service organizations use customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores as the master metric for gauging the customer's experience. And managers frequently assume that the more satisfied customers are, the more than loyal they will be. Only, like others before the states (nigh notably Fred Reichheld), we find trivial human relationship between satisfaction and loyalty. Twenty per centum of the "satisfied" customers in our report said they intended to go out the company in question; 28% of the "dissatisfied" customers intended to stay.
The film gets bleaker still. Although customer service can do little to increase loyalty, it can (and typically does) do a peachy bargain to undermine it. Customers are four times more likely to exit a service interaction disloyal than loyal.
Some other way to recall almost the sources of customer loyalty is to imagine two pies—ane containing things that drive loyalty and the other containing things that drive disloyalty. The loyalty pie consists largely of slices such every bit product quality and brand; the piece for service is quite small. But service accounts for about of the disloyalty pie. We buy from a company because it delivers quality products, great value, or a compelling make. We exit one, more often than not, because it fails to evangelize on client service.
Make it Easy
Let's render to the key implication of our research: When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily. Armed with this agreement, nosotros tin can fundamentally modify the emphasis of client service interactions. Framing the service challenge in terms of making it easy for the customer can be highly illuminating, fifty-fifty liberating, especially for companies that have been struggling to delight. Telling frontline reps to exceed customers' expectations is apt to yield confusion, wasted time and effort, and costly giveaways. Telling them to "make it like shooting fish in a barrel" gives them a solid foundation for action.
Telling reps to exceed customers' expectations is apt to yield confusion, wasted time and effort, and costly giveaways.
What exactly does "make it piece of cake" hateful? Simply: Remove obstacles. We identified several recurring complaints about service interactions, including three that focus specifically on customer effort. Customers resent having to contact the visitor repeatedly (or be transferred) to get an upshot resolved, having to echo data, and having to switch from one service aqueduct to some other (for instance, needing to call after trying unsuccessfully to solve a problem through the website). Well over half the customers we surveyed reported encountering difficulties of this sort. Companies tin reduce these types of endeavor and measure out the furnishings with a new metric, the Customer Effort Score (CES), which assigns ratings from 1 to v, with 5 representing very loftier attempt. (For details, see the sidebar "Introducing the Customer Effort Score.")
We evaluated the predictive ability of iii metrics—client satisfaction (CSAT), the Net Promoter Score (NPS), and a new metric we developed, the Customer Try Score (CES)—on customer loyalty, defined as customers' intention to go along doing business organization with the company, increment the corporeality they spend, or spread positive (and not negative) word of mouth. Not surprisingly, CSAT was a poor predictor. NPS proved improve (and has been shown to exist a powerful gauge at the company level). CES outperformed both in client service interactions.
CES is measured by asking a single question: "How much attempt did yous personally take to put along to handle your request?" It is scored on a scale from one (very low endeavour) to 5 (very high endeavour). Customer service organizations can use CES, along with operational measurements of such things as echo calls, transfers, and channel switching, to comport an "effort audit" and improve areas where customers are expending undue energy. Many of the companies we work with use CES to intervene with customers at risk of defecting.
Nosotros found the predictive power of CES to be potent indeed. Of the customers who reported low effort, 94% expressed an intention to repurchase, and 88% said they would increase their spending. Just 1% said they would speak negatively about the company. Conversely, 81% of the customers who had a hard time solving their issues reported an intention to spread negative word of mouth.
We believe that the superior operation of CES in the service surroundings derives from 2 factors: its power to capture customer impressions at the transactional level (equally opposed to NPS, which captures more than-holistic impressions of a visitor) and its power to capture negative experiences also as positive ones.
A related diagnostic tool, the Customer Endeavour Audit, can be downloaded at http://www.executiveboard.com/salesandmarketing/CCC-CustomerEffortAudit.html.
During our study, nosotros saw many companies that had successfully implemented depression-customer-try approaches to service. Following are five of the tactics they used—tactics that every company should adopt.
1. Don't just resolve the current event—head off the next i.
By far the biggest cause of excessive customer try is the need to phone call back. Many companies believe they're performing well in this regard, because they have strong first-contact-resolution (FCR) scores. (Encounter the sidebar "What Should Y'all Measure?") However, 22% of repeat calls involve downstream issues related to the problem that prompted the original phone call, even if that trouble itself was adequately addressed the first time around. Although companies are well equipped to anticipate and "forward-resolve" these problems, they rarely do so, by and large because they're overly focused on managing call time. They demand to realize that customers approximate the effort they expend not just in terms of how an individual call is handled only also according to how the visitor manages evolving service events, such as taking out a mortgage or setting upward cablevision service, that typically require several calls.
Bell Canada met this challenge past mining its customer interaction data to understand the relationships among various customer issues. Using what it learned most "outcome clusters," Bong began training its reps not simply to resolve the client'due south principal issue but too to anticipate and address common downstream issues. For instance, a high percent of customers who ordered a particular feature chosen back for instructions on using information technology. The company's service reps now give a quick tutorial to customers about central aspects of the feature before hanging up. This sort of forward resolution enabled Bong to reduce its "calls per event" by 16% and its customer churn past 6%. For circuitous downstream issues that would take excessive time to address in the initial phone call, the visitor sends follow-upward east-mails—for example, explaining how to interpret the first billing statement. Bell Canada is currently weaving this result-prediction arroyo into the telephone call-routing experience for the customer.
Allegiance uses a similar concept on its self-service website, offering "suggested next steps" to customers executing certain transactions. Often customers who change their address online telephone call later to order new checks or ask about homeowners' or renters' insurance; therefore, Fidelity directs them to these topics before they leave the site. Twenty-five pct of all cocky-service transactions on Fidelity'due south website are now generated by similar "next issue" prompts, and calls per household have dropped past 5% since the policy began.
ii. Arm reps to accost the emotional side of customer interactions.
Twenty-four percent of the repeat calls in our written report stemmed from emotional disconnects between customers and reps—situations in which, for instance, the customer didn't trust the rep'due south information or didn't like the answer given and had the impression that the rep was just hiding backside general company policy. With some basic education, reps can eliminate many interpersonal problems and thereby reduce repeat calls.
One U.k.-based mortgage visitor teaches its reps how to listen for clues to a customer'south personality blazon. They quickly assess whether they are talking to a "controller," a "thinker," a "feeler," or an "entertainer," and tailor their responses accordingly, offering the customer the balance of detail and speed appropriate for the personality type diagnosed. This strategy has reduced repeat calls by a remarkable 40%.
1 company teaches its reps how to mind for clues to a customer's personality blazon and tailor their responses appropriately.
The lighting company Osram Sylvania sifts through its call transcripts to pinpoint words that tend to trigger negative reactions and drive repeat calls—words like "tin't," "won't," and "don't"—and coaches its reps on alternate phrasing. Instead of saying "We don't take that item in stock," a rep might explicate, "We'll have stock availability for that item in two weeks." Through such simple changes in linguistic communication, Osram Sylvania has lowered its Customer Try Score from 2.8 to ii.two—xviii.5% beneath the average we see for B2B companies.
LoyaltyOne, the operator of the AIR MILES reward plan, teaches reps to probe for information they tin use to better position potentially disappointing outcomes. A rep dealing with a customer who wants to redeem miles for an unavailable flight might learn that the caller is traveling to an important business meeting and apply this fact to put a positive spin on the need to volume a dissimilar flying. The rep might say, "It sounds like this is something you lot can't be late for. The Mon morning flying isn't available, only with potential delays, you'd be cutting it close anyway. I'd recommend a Sunday evening flight so that you don't risk missing your coming together." This strategy has resulted in an 11% subtract in echo contacts.
three. Minimize channel switching past increasing self-service channel "stickiness."
Many companies ask, "How tin can we go our customers to go to our self-service website?" Our research shows that in fact many customers have already been there: 50-seven per centum of inbound calls came from customers who went to the website first. Despite their want to accept customers turn to the spider web, companies tend to resist making improvements to their sites, bold that only heavy spending and technology upgrades volition induce customers to stay there. (And even when costly upgrades are made, they often prove counterproductive, considering companies tend to add complicated and confusing features in an attempt to keep up with their competitors.)
Customers may get overwhelmed by the profusion of cocky-service channels—interactive voice response, websites, e-mail, chat, online support communities, social media such every bit Facebook and Twitter, and so on—and oft lack the ability to brand the best selection for themselves. For example, technically unsophisticated users, left to their own devices, may get to highly technical online support communities. Equally a consequence, customers may expend a lot of endeavour bouncing between channels, only to choice upwards the phone in the end.
Cisco Consumer Products now guides customers to the channel it determines will suit them best, on the basis of segment-specific hypotheses generated past the company'south customer feel team. Language on the site's abode folio nudges technology gurus toward the online support customs; those with less technical expertise are steered toward knowledge articles past the promise of simple stride-past-footstep instructions. The company eliminated the e-mail choice, having found that it didn't reliably reduce customer effort. (Our research shows that 2.four eastward-mails, on average, are needed to resolve an issue, compared with ane.7 calls.) When Cisco Consumer Products began this plan, in 2006, but 30% of its customer contacts were handled through self-service; the figure today is 84%, and the book of calls has dropped appropriately.
Travelocity reduced customer try only past improving the aid section of its website. It had learned that many customers who sought solutions in that location were stymied and resorted to the telephone. By eliminating jargon, simplifying the layout, and otherwise improving readability, the visitor doubled the use of its "peak searches" and decreased calls by v%.
4. Utilise feedback from disgruntled or struggling customers to reduce client effort.
Many companies comport postcall surveys to measure internal performance; withal, they may fail to use the data they collect to learn from unhappy customers. Only consider National Australia Group's approach. The visitor has frontline reps specifically trained to telephone call customers who have given it low marks. The reps focus showtime on resolving the customers' issues, but they also collect feedback that informs service improvements. The visitor's issue-resolution rate has risen by 31%.
Such learning and intervention isn't limited to the phone channel. Some companies monitor online behavior in order to place customers who are struggling. EarthLink has a dedicated team of reps who step in as needed with clients on its cocky-service website—for example, by initiating a chat with a customer who has spent more xc seconds in the noesis center or clicked on the "Contact Us" link. This program has reduced calls by eight%.
v. Empower the front line to evangelize a depression-effort experience.
Incentive systems that value speed over quality may pose the single greatest bulwark to reducing customer effort. Nigh customer service organizations still emphasize productivity metrics such as average handle fourth dimension when assessing rep performance. They would exist better off removing the productivity "governors" that get in the fashion of making the customer's experience like shooting fish in a barrel.
An Australian telecommunications provider eliminated all productivity metrics from its frontline reps' operation scorecards. Although handle time increased slightly, repeat calls fell by 58%. Today the company evaluates its reps solely on the basis of short, direct interviews with customers, essentially asking them if the service they received met their needs.
Freed to focus on reducing client effort, frontline reps can easily pick depression-hanging fruit. Ameriprise Financial, for example, asks its customer service reps to capture every example in which they are forced to tell a customer no. While auditing the "no's," the company found many legacy policies that had been outmoded by regulatory changes or organization or procedure improvements. During its first year of "capturing the no's," Ameriprise modified or eliminated 26 policies. Information technology has since expanded the plan by asking frontline reps to come upwards with other process efficiencies, generating $1.2 million in savings as a result.
Some companies have gone even further, making depression customer attempt the cornerstone of their service value suggestion and branding. Southward Africa's Nedbank, for instance, instituted an "AskOnce" promise, which guarantees that the rep who picks up the telephone will own the customer'due south issue from start to end.
The firsthand mission is articulate: Corporate leaders must focus their service organizations on mitigating disloyalty past reducing client effort. Merely service managers fretting about how to reengineer their contact centers—departments built on a foundation of delighting the customer—should consider this: A massive shift is under way in terms of customers' service preferences. Although virtually 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 every bit the primary aqueduct for customer service interactions. For enterprising service managers, information technology presents an opportunity to rebuild their organizations around self-service and, in the process, to put reducing customer effort firmly at the cadre, where it belongs.
A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2010 issue of Harvard Business organization Review.
What Kind Of Sinage Can You Have To Tell Customers We Are Not A Fast Service,
Source: https://hbr.org/2010/07/stop-trying-to-delight-your-customers
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