The Effortless Experience: 5 key findings on Client Experience (Book Review)

At some point, we are all customers and the way we interact with brands has a direct impact on our behaviour towards them. The Effortless Experience provides a solid research which demonstrates that reducing customer effort has measurable loyalty impact.

Here are five findings from this book that I personally found fascinating:

1. Low effort experience = More business. 96% of customers who had high-effort experiences were reported being disloyal.

94% of customers who had low-effort experiences reported that they would repurchase from the same company. 4% of customers who experience high-effort interactions reported an intent to repurchase.

2. Customers just want what was promised to them.

There is no difference between the loyalty of those customers whose expectations are exceeded and those whose expectations are simply met.

3. The role of customer service is to mitigate disloyalty by reducing customer effort.

According to this research, any customer service interaction is four times more likely to drive disloyalty than to drive loyalty.

4. We pick companies because of their products, but we often leave them because of their service failures.

“Only” 32% of customers with a negative product experience want to tell other people about it. 65% of clients with poor customer service will share their experience. Just 9% of customers with low-effort experiences who reported being disloyal.

5. Effort is one-third “do” and two-thirds “feel.”

Much of customer effort is driven by a customer’s perception of whether the service interaction was required significant effort.

Here are a few quick takeaways:

• More choices create a higher-effort decision. More and more choices actually impede our ability to make a good decision; a bad outcome both for the customer and the company

• Low-effort companies don’t just resolve the current issue for a customer; they prevent and solve the next one.

• The challenge lies in getting today’s customer to avoid channel switching from self-service to a live phone call, avoiding the cost and disloyalty that comes with it.

• It’s not about getting customers to try self-service, it’s about getting them to stay in self-service. Nearly 58% of all inbound calls are from customers who were just on the company’s web site, in many cases trying unsuccessfully to solve their issue.

• Just because there’s nothing you can do, doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. Lower effort translates to less disloyalty, then strategic and financial success.

• Reducing customer effort can’t just be the “flavour of the week.” It should be the operating philosophy.

Review based on: Dixon, Matthew; Toman, Nicholas; DeLisi, Rick. The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty. Penguin Books Ltd.