Stop Trying To Delight Your Customers
Recently The New York Times implemented a digital subscription policy and began charging for access to NYTimes.com. But as a home delivery subscriber I’m entitled to unlimited access on my phone and computer.
So I wasn’t too concerned when I was on a business trip and reached the monthly limit of 20 free downloads. The pay wall I encountered on my phone gave me an opportunity to log in as a home subscriber. When I did, I received a cheery message: Your Benefits Have Been Activated! And I was invited to return to the article I was attempting to download.
But when I tried to reach the article, I was sent to the pay wall. So I logged in as a home subscriber. I was delighted to see that Your Benefits Have Been Activated! And I was invited to return to the article and . . . was sent to the pay wall.
Two weeks, four phone calls and more than an hour of my time later, the problem has been resolved. (And here’s a special thank you to Resolution Specialist Oneka at extension 4718!)
But my recent experience with The Times was on my mind as I was reading the article Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman (Harvard Business Review July-August, 2010). Their Idea in Brief:
Conventional wisdom holds that to increase loyalty, companies must “delight” customers by exceeding expectations. A large-scale study of contact-center and self-service interactions, however, finds that what customers really want (but rarely get) is just a satisfactory solution to their service issue.
As part of their study, the authors evaluated the power of three metrics to predict customer loyalty.
- To the surprise of no one, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) once again proved to be a poor indicator of loyalty.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) was a more accurate predictor of loyalty.
- But the most accurate metric was Customer Effort Score (CES). This measurement is determined by asking just one question: “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?”
In my recent interactions, The New York Times performed rather poorly on this CES measure. I recall my frustration when the third representative I spoke with returned to the line after one of numerous holds and said: “Thank you for patiently holding.” “Please don’t thank me for my patience,” I said somewhat tensely. “I’m rapidly losing my patience. Please fix the problem.”
So here are five tips to make it easier for customers to solve their problems quickly and easily:
- Don’t just resolve the current issue – head off the next one.
- Arm reps to address the emotional side of customer interactions.
- Minimize channel switching by increasing self-service channel “stickiness.”
- Use feedback from disgruntled or struggling customers to reduce customer effort.
- Empower the front-line to deliver a low-effort experience.
What is your organization doing to make it easier for your customers to do business with you?
Reprints of the article and a download of the Customer Contact Council® Effort Audit tool are available from the Customer Executive Board. Click here to read.