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The research started as a quest to discover the most effective ways to delight customers. It soon took an unexpected turn.
Matt Dixon and his colleagues found that delighting customers didn't pay.
According to Dixon, "Those customers who are surprised, delighted, and wowed are actually no more loyal than those customers whose expectations are simply met."
They did find one thing that creates more loyalty: reducing customer effort.
Dixon co-authored a book called The Effortless Experience that details this research and shares practical ways companies can make it easier for customers to do business with them.
In our interview, Dixon shares four ways companies can reduce customer effort and improve loyalty.
Here are a few topics we discussed in our conversation:
What is customer effort?
Why is preventing service failures so important?
How can companies reduce customer effort?
You can watch the full interview, or continue reading to see some of the highlights.
What is customer effort?
Dixon describes customer effort as making customers jump through hoops, and gave several common examples:
Making a customer call multiple times to get their problem fixed.
Confusing or broken self-service options.
Forcing customers to switch communication channels to get help.
Transferring customers from one department to the next.
Making customers repeat information, such as account numbers.
The difference between a high and low effort experience can be dramatic. For example, updating an expired credit used for automatic payments ranged from effortless to an epic hassle.
Why is it so important to prevent service failures?
"On average, most service interactions don't create loyalty at all," said Dixon. "They create disloyalty."
Think about the service stories people tell you. They are overwhelmingly negative. It's those bad experiences that stick in our memories.
Dixon explained that companies can improve loyalty just by meeting expectations. "There's a lot of good that we as companies can do by simply delivering the basics, simply delivering what the customer expects, and doing it in a consistent and predictable way."
In other words, be easy to do business with and customers will spend less time thinking about your competitors.
Four Ways to Reduce Customer Effort
One of the things I really like about The Effortless Experience is it has so many practical exercises you can use to reduce or eliminate customer effort.
Dixon highlighted four examples in our conversation.
Write self-service articles in plain language
Many self-service articles are poorly written or contain excessive industry jargon that make them difficult for customers to read and understand.
Improving these articles can quickly reduce customer effort. Dixon shared an example from the travel website, Travelocity.
Customer service reps were getting frequent calls about issues that were easily resolved via self-service articles. Those calls decreased dramatically when the articles were re-written using clearer language.
Go to the 8:00 minute mark in the interview for the full explanation.
Customer service writing expert, Leslie O'Flahavan, suggests getting input from frontline employees to identify troublesome self-service articles. According to O'Flahavan, "Frontline support agents know what customers have already tried to understand on their own."
O'Flahavan's LinkedIn Learning course, Writing in Plain Language, has a lot of terrific tips and suggestions for improving the clarity of your writing.
Avoid the next issue
Try to help customers avoid having to contact your company multiple times.
Dixon gave an example of a wireless phone service provider that created a special $39.99 per month offer for new customers. The company got a lot of angry calls from customers who received their first bill and it was much more than $39.99.
This was explained to customers when they first signed up for service, but the bill didn't come for six weeks and many customers forgot.
A brainstorming exercise with frontline reps revealed a simple solution.
The team decided to send customers an email shortly before the first bill came out. The email clearly explained everything that went into the bill such as one-time set-up fees and required taxes. This simple email dramatically reduced the amount of calls from angry customers who were surprised by their first bill.
You can do the same exercise with your team.
Dixon suggests asking your team to imagine they had an extra 30 seconds to help each customer. What would could they do to help customers avoid future issues?
Go to the 9:13 minute mark in the interview to see Dixon's explanation.
Engineer a better experience
The way we present information to customers can make it more palatable.
Dixon gave an example of a customer trying to book a last minute flight for an important business meeting. The customer wants to use airline miles to travel on a Monday, but the flight is sold out.
Just saying, "Sorry, that flight is sold out," could be a major disappointment.
A better strategy would be to engage the customer in what Dixon calls "purposeful small talk." This involves asking questions to better understand the customer's situation.
For example, you might discover the customer's meeting is on Tuesday. The Monday flight is sold out, but there are still seats available on Sunday and the customer has enough points to book a hotel in addition to the flight.
Suggesting the Sunday flight as an alternative might turn an unpleasant idea (missing the meeting), into the positive experience of spending an extra day in a new city.
Go to 12:51 in the interview for more ideas on experience engineering.
Give the frontlines control
Employees must be empowered to deliver a low effort experience.
"Low effort really begins at home," says Dixon. "It starts with understanding what are the things we do today to make life difficult for our representatives."
One exercise that can help you identify this issue is to meet with your team and brainstorm a list of situations where employees frequently have to say "No" to customers.
You can use that list to identify several solutions:
Policies that need to be changed or made more flexible.
Resources that can help employees provide better service.
Alternative solutions that can make the customer happy.
I've run this exercise myself, and it's both a fun and eye-opening experience that frequently reveals immediate opportunities for improvement.
Check out these employee empowerment resources to learn more, or go to the 18:08 minute mark in the interview to hear Dixon's explanation.
Additional Resources
The Effortless Experience is a highly recommended book that's full of practical advice and hands-on activities.
You can also find Dixon on LinkedIn, or check out the work he is doing at Tethr. The company provides a machine learning platform to identify customer effort in customer service calls without using a survey.
You have an urgent service issue, so you decide to call. The interactive voice response system (IVR) prompts you to enter some basic account information like the last four digits of your social security number.
The real frustration begins once you (finally) get a live agent on the phone and they ask you for the same information all over again.
Chances are, you got a little frustrated. "Why do I need to give you all this information?! Can't you just solve my problem?"
That led to a 30 second explanation full of nonsense about security, system limitations, and hints about evil bosses who will throw a fit if they don't verify it's really and truly you. It doesn’t make you feel any better, and you realize you just wasted more time.
The whole thing is a terrible experience.
And if your contact center is doing this to customers, you're also wasting precious handle time by not empowering your agents to serve people faster.
I’m going to show you three ways to fix that by providing more authority, resources, and procedures. But first, let’s look at how contact centers are wasting time.
How do contact centers waste time?
There are a number of common practices that waste time in contact centers. Some are overt, while others are more subtle. Here's a partial list:
Not using caller ID to help verify the caller and pull up the customer record.
Asking customers to share or verify data you don't use.
Poor agent typing skills.
Weak knowledge bases that cause agents to hunt for information.
Lack of call control skills that would help agents effectively move the call.
There's another big one contact center leaders don't talk about. It's called priming, and it's a growing problem.
Priming is a phenomenon in which exposure to a stimulus, such as a word or image, influences how one responds to a subsequent, related stimulus.
The issue starts in other channels like self-service, social media, or chat which are frequently not optimized. Customers eventually give up and decide to call, which they often associate with wasting time.
Then your IVR steps in. Customers associate it with wasting even more time. So their frustration grows when they punch in menu options or try to get the speech recognition software to understand them.
Your poor agent now has an even angrier customer on the line when they finally get connected. And angry customers take longer to serve.
So your IVR is adding talk time, but your agents aren’t empowered to skip the script and give some of that time back. In fact, they're often required to waste more customer time, right at the start of the call by asking for a lot of nonsense before getting down to business.
Given the right empowerment, it would be easy for many contact centers to cut at least 15 seconds off their average handle time while improving the agent experience.
How can you quickly cut average handle time?
Let's take a look at the authority, resources, and procedures that can help agents provide better, faster service to their phone customers.
Authority
Allow agents to skip meaningless confirmation data. A customer calling to check the status of their order shouldn't need to share their mother's maiden name, favorite movie, and secret pin number just to get an answer.
Here's how my dentist office verified my information when I called to schedule a cleaning appointment:
The employee used caller ID to identify me and pull up my file.
She asked, "Is this Jeff?"
The employee then asked me if my insurance had changed.
That was it. Quick and easy, and on to business.
The key was empowering the employee to understand what information needed to be verified. The nature of my call, scheduling an appointment, didn't require a lot of verification. It would have been understandable if she had to ask a lot of security questions in exchange for sharing sensitive information from my file.
Resources
We need to give our agents better tools to serve customers quickly. Here are just a few that would cut down on customer frustration and decrease handle time:
An IVR that only requests information that's actually used.
A better knowledge base so agents can quickly access information.
Improved scheduling so agents are more available.
There are a surprising number of opportunities for contact centers to improve scheduling. Contact center expert Brad Cleveland shared several practical tips in a recent interview.
Procedures
Call control is becoming a lost art in the contact center.
If you're unfamiliar with the concept, it's a set of techniques for efficiently moving the call along in a way that the customer is happy with. It requires the agent to balance making the customer feel good with getting the job done quickly.
Customer service expert, Myra Golden, has an excellent call control course on LinkedIn Learning. You can access it with your LinkedIn Learning subscription or get a 30-day trial.
Join me for a special webinar with my friends at Unymira on Tuesday, May 12 at 10am Pacific. We’ll be sharing five ways you can cut handle time, and we’ll answer your questions, too!
You also don't need to believe anything I've just written. Try an experiment for yourself. Start by dividing your agents into two groups:
Group A: have them do things the way they've always done them.
Group B: give them more authority, resources, and procedures to cut handle time.
Run your experiment over the course of two weeks. Look at the data in three areas to see how Group B compares to Group A:
Handle time: Do the new techniques reduce average handle time?
Quality: Do the new techniques improve or reduce call quality?
Service: Are customers happier when the new techniques are used?
I'll be curious to hear how it goes. You can contact me or leave the results as a comment below.
