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

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.

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).

the channel selection should not be the issue; the customer’s issue is the issue.

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.

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.

When you stay at a Motel 6 property, what do you expect? A low price, a clean room, and some baseline of decently acceptable service, but nothing like what you’d get at a Ritz-Carlton. And that’s perfectly fine. Expectations, after all, are relative.

the role of customer service, therefore, is not to drive loyalty by delighting customers, but to mitigate customer disloyalty.

low effort beats channel choice by a landslide. We found that a whopping 84 percent of customers simply want their issue resolved as quickly and easily as possible—and