A recent blog post on Harvard Business Review titled, “I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore,” was unfortunately very relatable.  The core of the article explored how business conversations have evolved into bits of nonsense (e.g., “synergy”, ”value-add”) that make understanding each other much more of a challenge than anything else.

We all fall victim to the excessive use of acronyms from time to time.  And while I too find myself guilty of using a lot of acronyms, I also related to something else in the piece, because its description ties perfectly to research produced by both the SEC and our sister program, the Customer Contact Council:

“Another term that has lost its meaning is ‘Let’s exceed the customer’s expectations.’ …Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer’s expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? I was at a [hotel] a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, ‘Our goal is to exceed the customer’s expectation.’  The best way to start would be to take down that sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do…”

While this was a retail customer setting, the same principle holds true for sales and service organizations.  Attempting to exceed customer expectations is a losing battle. You’ll unnecessarily spend resources trying to delight your customers, when research shows that doing so has only a marginal impact on customer loyalty.   Read More »

What if I told you that the long-standing beliefs driving your customer engagement strategy actually turned out to harm you in the long run?

Imagine the surprise of sales and service execs when they found out that, in the service channel, going above and beyond when serving the customer doesn’t pay off. The break-through research from our sister program—the Customer Contact Council—dismantled many of these universally held beliefs about customer loyalty.

Finding #1: Customer service organizations should care first and foremost about mitigating disloyalty—customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal as compared to loyal.

Finding #2: The primary thing service organizations can do to mitigate disloyalty is to focus on reducing the effort customers must put forth to get their issues resolved. In other words, make it easy for the customers to solve their problems.

Finding #3: It is not only that the problem is resolved that matters, but also how.  The customer’s perception of how much effort they put in is about two times as influential as the actual actions taken by the customer.

(SEC Members, read more about these findings in Are You a Low-Effort Service Organization?)

Fascinating, isn’t it, especially if you think about the implications these findings have for your sales strategy.  Do sales organizations need to worry about eliminating unnecessary effort for customers? As it turns out, they do.   Read More »

(This is a guest post by Matt Lind of the Customer Contact Council, our sister program for heads of Customer Service and Contact Centers.)

If we’ve learned (or rather, confirmed) anything from our work with customer service organizations, it’s that customer service professionals have a healthy sense of humor about themselves and their jobs—even though they seem to get more than their fair share of ridicule.

Let’s face it, though. Despite the fact that we all strive to eliminate poor experiences that are frustrating for customers, from an outsider’s perspective these situations can be…well…absolutely hilarious. And it’s not just standup comedians and sitcoms that are leveraging the comedic fodder to be had; on the contrary, more and more companies are pushing customer service to differentiate themselves—and using some spectacularly bad examples to illustrate their competitors’ allegedly inferior service.

With that in mind, we’ve dug up a few customer service-related spoofs, pranks, and advertisements that are sure to keep you laughing…unless, of course, you’re that frustrated customer on the other end of the line:

1.   Diapers.com – Customer Service Experts
In a possible nod to the talking E*TRADE baby, Diapers.com gives new meaning to the phrase “putting yourself in the customer’s shoes” by staffing their call center with an army of helpful baby-agents. Sympathetic to the familiar plights of ordering formula and assembling tricycles, these junior customer service reps field calls in between naps—all while pulling off the impossible task of wearing nothing but a diaper at work.   Read More »

By Andrew Kent

The next time your CFO tries to take the cost-savings axe to your travel budget, tell him (or her) that for every dollar it adds to the bottom line, cutting travel will cost $12.50 to the top line.  That’s according to a new study by Oxford Economics USA, “The Return on Investment of U.S. Business Travel.”  In fact, the study showed that conversion rates were more than 2.5 times higher for in-person meetings than those conducted by other means.

To be fair, the study was commissioned by the US Travel Foundation, so it’s not exactly a neutral source.  But even if you question the exact ROI number, is it that hard to believe that visiting customers face-to-face is important for business?

There are two main reasons why business travel matters, in a way that can’t just be replaced by phone or video conference: Read More »

This week marks the official release of the Customer Effort concept into the “wild” with the publication of our article, entitled “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers,” in the July/August issue of Harvard Business Review. If you haven’t seen the article, feel free to download a complimentary copy. You will also find some cool podcasts and our Customer Effort Audit tool available to download.

As you’ll read in the article, our research shows that “delighting” the customer—in other words, going above and beyond—yields only marginal additional loyalty from the customer.

We also found that customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal as compared to loyal, and the primary thing companies can do to mitigate this disloyalty in the service channel is to focus on reducing the effort customers must put forth to get their issues resolved.

Put succinctly, loyalty in the service environment is a matter of reducing effort, not delighting the customer.

One thing this article pushed us to do was to think about the prescriptive advice we would give companies who want to pursue this low-effort journey. It’s not easy summing up more than four years of research around effort, what causes it and what leading companies are doing to eliminate it, but we managed to come up with the following list of five things that low-effort companies do (and are different, we have found, from what most companies do):     Read More »

Click Image to Enlarge | Drivers of Sales Performance

Many SEC members have been asking us how to get their contact center staff to up-sell and cross-sell customers while they’re on the phone with them.  For the most part, this interest is driven by a desire to allow the field sales organization to focus on more complex selling activities by getting other, lower-cost, channels focused on the transactional sales.  

But a huge majority of these same members report that they struggle to make headway and that these efforts to turn the contact center into a sales channel end up stalling out.  

SEC’s sister program, the Customer Contact Council, recently looked at the best levers for getting service reps to up-sell and cross-sell.  Their study of 1300+ contact center reps across more than 50 companies helps explain why most companies stumble in their efforts to drive sales through the contact center. 

The two big reasons are:

1) Sales productivity is driven by a different set of levers in the contact center: Senior leaders tend to think that the two most important levers to pull in building sales capabilities are to build a sales culture/environment in the contact center and to increase the organization’s emphasis on monetary rewards. 

The CCC’s research, however, shows that the “sales culture” effect is nominal, at best.  Meanwhile, an over-emphasis on monetary incentives can actually harm sales performance for customer service reps.   Read More »