The Effortless Experience

58 percent of a company’s inbound call volume comes from customers who first were on the company’s web site but, for some reason or another, still ended up calling the contact center.

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.

guiding customers to the pathway that will require the least amount of effort is much more likely to mitigate disloyalty and create the best experience.

the vast majority of customers will entertain nearly any self-service option or channel as long as they are confident it will create a faster and easier resolution experience.

96 percent of customers who had high-effort experiences reported being disloyal, compared to only 9 percent of customers with low-effort experiences who reported being disloyal. Ninety-six to nine!

Customers who attempt to self-serve but are forced to pick up the phone are 10 percent more disloyal than customers who were able to resolve their issue in their channel of first choice (see figure 2.2).

To be precise, according to our research, any customer service interaction is four times more likely to drive disloyalty than to drive loyalty (see figure 1.5).

You could also visit a twenty-four-hour clinic, or even go the emergency room. But increasingly, what do most parents do in this situation? We turn to an online resource, such as WebMD.

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