The Effortless Experience

First, what companies do you do business with or buy from specifically because of the exceptional customer service they provide? Second, what companies have you stopped buying from and refused to do business with because of the awful service you’ve experienced?

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

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

according to our research, any customer service interaction is four times more likely to drive disloyalty than to drive loyalty

customers who need live rep attention are getting it, and the customers who wanted to self-serve are easily able to finish online.

the job of service is to return the customer to a state of neutrality—back to where they started before the problem occurred in the first place. And that’s good customer service.

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).

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.

rep proactively suggest ways to solve issues that will likely happen after you hang up the phone, helping you to avoid having to call again unnecessarily. We’ve dubbed this concept next issue avoidance,