Customer Success

Why CEB’s ‘Stop delighting your customers’ makes sense for your business

June 18, 2015

There was an excellent talk by the Chris Herbert of CEB at the Art of Customer Satisfaction conference in London where Nickelled was exhibiting this week. The talk was looking at the impact of delighting your customer and the impact to loyalty (Will they keep using your service?). The results were counterintuitive and surprising.

CEB looked at the customer service departments results from 100s of companies and 10,000s of agents. They discovered that exceeding the customers expectations increased the operational costs between 10-20% and had only a marginal increase in customer loyalty vs meeting the customers expectations. The graph below shows the expectations and reality.

The findings of the research showed that if you want to increase customer loyalty your company should focus on reducing customer effort.

Some tips from Nickelled on how you can go about reducing the customer effort:

  • 60% of people that call you for support have already checked the help section on your website. You need to make sure the help they’re looking for is there, it’s easy to understand and they can navigate to it intuitively.
  • The best support is no support, so if you can fix the problems with the underlying product or solve the problem before they become aware of it then that’s a big win. Nickelled’s embedded solutions can help here.
  • Where possible you want to resolve the customers problem on first contact (FCR). Make sure your team have a mandate to help the customer and the resources to do it. One way to improve in this is area is to reduce the emphasis on tracking call times and to focus on reopen rates and customer satisfaction.
  • Improve next issue avoidance. Provide timely instructions to your users based on there interactions with your site or support team either via email or where possible inside the application.

If you’d like to read more about the report you can find a summary on HBR or you can buy The Effortless Experience book here.