The surprise & delight myth
Does “Surprise & Delight” really drive loyalty?
“1–3% of all transactions, both online and offline, will result in dispute. By 2017 there will be an estimated 1 billion e-commerce disputes companies will need to resolve” — Matthew Dixon, CEB
Hello there! I read a book a little while back that totally flipped my thinking on experience design so I wanted to pass it on.
The Effortless Experience.
So you’ve heard the mantra a million times: “We need to surprise and delight our customers!”.
We’ve all heard the examples thrown around our respective businesses. The customer service rep who drove through the night to deliver the document to a client. Every business has these legends of ‘service excellence’ — but the challenge is how do you scale these in a meaningful way? How does your team do differently having heard them?
Author, Matthew Dixon from Gartner, leads a study covering 125,000 customer interactions, 5,000 different customer service reps across over 100 different businesses. The quest is simple, what really drives loyalty behaviour?
Delivering ‘delight’ isn’t a great growth strategy.
Delivering ‘delight’ is the wrong goal. It’s nigh-on impossible to execute with consistency and even when we do, the data suggests it doesn’t really drive loyalty. What’s more, constantly trying to delight your customers is boosting your operating costs by 10–20% without driving top-line growth.
The insight? Stop trying to exceed customer expectations and get focused on meeting them consistently.
The human touch (usually) sucks.
When the proverbial hits the fan people just want to speak to a real person right? Wrong. Statistically, when customers with a problem speak to a customer service rep, they are almost 4x more likely to become disloyal as a result.
This could be for any number of reasons: having to switch between channels (e.g. phone to email to phone to letter to phone), having to repeat information, poor rapport with the rep or just the pure hassle of getting passed around to get an issue resolved.
The insight? Stop pushing escalating issues to humans and find ways to deliver more consistent, automated problem resolution for known issues. Avoid channel switching wherever you can by planning better journeys.
Effort is the enemy.
So it turns out the thing that really pisses off customers is having to expend a high level of effort to complete a task — whether that’s issue related or not. This feels intuitively true right? We all get that nagging feeling when something just feels like way too much hassle than it needs to be.
Turns out, businesses who systematically reduce effort at each step of the customer journey tend to outperform the market in terms of loyalty.
The insight? Build a programme of change that helps your teams obsess about finding the most annoying, time-consuming parts of your customer experience. Then give them permission to eradicate effort like it’s going out of fashion. Using Service blueprints and testing improvements with customers can be good ways to achieve this.
Strategic laziness = commercial growth.
When businesses embrace the shift to reducing customer effort, everywhere, they find the cost to serve customers cuts by as much as a third. Simply put, this is because less human capital gets wrapped up in executing a solid service experience.
The insight? measure the impact of your product or service improvement by how much it costs to service a typical customer. Less effort = less time interacting = less demand on your service infrastructure.
So yeah, go buy the book!
