service leaders believe that customers prefer phone service two and a half times more than online self-service—mainly because companies believe their customers want some sort of personal relationship with them.

stand in line at the bank to use the ATM, but know full well there’s a teller inside the bank who’s ready to help you. Most customers don’t just like self-service,

which pizzeria they called to order a pizza for a party, and they’ll probably look at you like you had three heads. “You don’t call someone to order a pizza, you just go online and order it. Why would you call someone?” We are in the era of self-service first.

You arrive at the airport, see a customer service agent standing there, yet you still head straight for the self-serve kiosk to change your seat, perhaps request an upgrade, and print your boarding pass.

Maybe customer service should be less about offense—bending over backwards to please customers—and more about defense, in the sense of preventing frustration and delay. What if the Holy Grail of service isn’t customer delight but customer relief—the simple relaxing of the shoulders that comes from having your problem handled quickly and smoothly?

strategy of effort reduction is about delivering on the most basic service promise we can make to our customers: When things go wrong, we’ll fix it. When you need help, we’ll help you with solid service delivery. Customers really don’t care to be delighted by you as much as they want to just get on with their lives, so your job is to eliminate the

over a third of customers who are on the phone with a company’s service reps at any one moment are also on that company’s web site at the same time (see figure 2.1).

Customer service is the crucible of the customer experience—the place where all of the company’s claims, its mission and its values, are tested. And it’s been a long-held belief in business that when your customer is most in need of help and you deliver an “above and beyond” service experience, you are effectively building a moat around your custom

60 to 80 percent of customers who ultimately defect had said they were satisfied or even very satisfied the last time they participated in a survey.