Make life easy for your customers and you will increase brand advocacy and ROI, says Matthew Dixon, managing director of Corporate Executive Board’s Customer Contact Council
Ongoing economic uncertainty and tough trading conditions have pushed the client experience even further up the corporate agenda, as the battle to retain existing customers and win new ones becomes even fiercer.
New research conducted by Corporate Executive Board’s Customer Contact Council reveals that many common investments to improve the service and support channel are not necessarily paying loyalty dividends. This is because organisations are habitually overstating the impact that exceeding clients’ customer service expectations have on loyalty. The belief that going above and beyond to satisfy customers will ensure their loyalty has led customer service strategies off-target.
The reality is that clients whose expectations are met in service interactions are only marginally more likely to be loyal compared to clients whose expectations were exceeded. In fact, we found that client satisfaction in service interactions is extremely poorly correlated with their loyalty.
Based on our research, service organisations are more likely to drive loyalty if they focus on reducing the amount of effort the client has to put forth to adequately address their service request. Clients who experience low-effort service interactions are nearly four times more likely to show loyalty compared to those who experience high-effort interactions. The upshot of low- effort experiences is increased spend and positive word-of-mouth.
So how can you improve your service and support to boost client loyalty and reduce churn?
1. Anticipate service problems
Troubleshooting a system error, setting up a new billing account or other complex inquiries, often take a client several contact attempts to fully resolve, which can lead to high effort. But, by ensuring that both the current enquiry and future potential issues are addressed during the initial conversation, representatives will reduce the need for the client to call back. Called ‘next issue avoidance’, one way to employ this technique is to look for patterns in the follow-up calls made by clients and ensure your frontline representatives resolve common follow-up issues during the first contact.
2. Encourage self-service
Many companies encourage clients to use their self-service websites in order to reduce service costs, but fear the impersonal service harms loyalty. However, 57 per cent of live calls come from clients who have already made contact via the website, but could not resolve their issue. Clients show increasing desire to use self-service channels in today’s environment, but often find information hard to locate and digest. Think carefully about where you can eliminate jargon or simplify your layout so you can actively guide clients to the tools and channels best suited to resolve their enquiry.
3. Recognise personalities
According to our research, 24 per cent of clients’ repeat calls stem from issues such as distrusting the information given by the representatives they spoke to or because they were unhappy with the information they were given. This can be addressed by training and coaching representatives to listen to cues and clues to recognise the type of personality the caller is, and then adapting the detail and speed of their response to match with the client’s personality
4. Seek out feedback
Instead of waiting for clients to come to you with problems, proactively call clients who gave negative feedback in customer surveys to both resolve the issue and to obtain a more detailed assessment of where the organisation went wrong. This customer voice can be used to inform service improvements and can include non-phone channels using online surveys to understand web channel failure points.
5. Use positive language
Clients often become frustrated with what companies cannot do for them, and language positioning only feeds these feelings.
Encourage employees to use positive language. Rather than using phrases such as ‘We don’t have that in stock’, train client-facing staff to say ‘We’ll have that in stock in X days time’ so that clients feel that the organisation intends to meet their needs. Our research found that simply rephrasing using positive language reduces customer effort by 73 per cent.
6. Arm service reps
Get rid of any incentive schemes that prioritise speed over quality when it comes to interaction with customers. Additionally, find formal channels to gather service representative feedback on improvement areas. Service reps are often able to identify areas of high client effort based on daily interactions.
Companies need to measure how much effort customers personally had to put forth in order to resolve their request, as it is more predictive of loyalty. It is this customer effort data that organisations should be basing strategic decisions around in order to drive client loyalty, and ultimately boost profits.
