When Companies Want to Reduce Costs and Improve the Customer Experience, "Delight" Doesn't Pay

The Corporate Executive Board has challenged conventional customer-service wisdom by revealing that it doesn't pay to delight a customer. After years of focus on the "above and beyond" service mentality, research from the Customer Contact Council, a division of CEB, indicates that most customers only seek a satisfactory solution to an issue, and that companies themselves are actually artificially raising expectations in their efforts to over-satisfy them. The research also suggests, and CEB advises, that reducing the level of effort a customer exerts in the service channel is a more effective and lucrative path to customer loyalty.

In fact, 96 percent of customers who put forth high effort to resolve their issues are more disloyal--an eye-opening number when companies consider that 59 percent of customers report moderate-to-high perceived additional effort in a service interaction. CEB's research found that, in aggregate, customer service interactions are nearly four times more likely to lead to disloyalty than loyalty. For companies seeking to mitigate disloyalty, reducing customer effort--not delighting the customer-is the greatest lever the contact center can pull. 

More information on customer loyalty can be found at www.SupportIndustry.com.