Is Your Customer Service Hurting Or Helping?

A study by the Corporate Executive Board Company found that a company’s customer service may do more damage than good if the customer must put in a great deal of effort during the interaction. Annoying customer service is four times more likely to make customers disloyal rather than loyal. The Customer Effort Score (CES) is a way to measure your customer service by asking a customer how difficult it was to place an order, get an issue resolved, get a question answered, or a problem fixed.

The authors of The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty (by Matthew Dixon and Nick Toman) argue, “The key to mitigating disloyalty is reducing customer effort. Companies should focus on making service easier, not more difficult, by reducing the amount of work required of customers to get their issues resolved. This includes avoiding them having to repeat information, having to repeatedly contact the company, switching channels, being transferred, and being treated in a generic manner.”

Part of the solution is eliminating the archaic way customer service representatives are managed. As explained in The Effortless Experience, you can empower “frontline reps to deliver a low-effort experience by using incentive systems that value the quality of the experience over merely speed and efficiency. They’ve moved away from the ‘stopwatch’ and ‘checklist’ culture that’s long permeated the service organization to instead give reps more autonomy and the opportunity to exercise a greater degree of judgment. They understand, in other words, that to get greater control over the quality of the experience delivered, they need to give greater control to the people delivering it.”

Speed of time and speed of service is critical to your customer experience. Everyone in the organization must understand how valuable time is to the customer. Companies like Google, Zappos, and Amazon have absorbed this lesson and shaped your customers’ expectations. The world of the Internet has made everything instantaneous, from information to products in people’s hands. Today a friend can recommend a good book, and within 30 seconds it is in your hands on your Kindle. You can order a product and companies may have it at your door the same day. This has also changed customers’ ability to be patient. They now expect not only phone calls and emails returned the same day, within an hour, but also support and resolutions to problematic issues.