# The Effortless Experience  Author:: Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, Rick DeLisi ## Highlights > defining loyalty in terms of three specific behaviors: repurchase (customers continue to buy from your company), share of wallet (customers buy more from you over time), and advocacy (customers say good things about your company to family, friends, coworkers, even to strangers). ([Location 162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=162)) > Once you’re consistently meeting the expectations of the majority of your customers, you’ve already done the most economically valuable thing you can do. ([Location 278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=278)) > What we find is that the specific things customer service does to drive disloyalty among customers are largely associated with the amount of work—or effort—customers must put forth to get their issues resolved. ([Location 424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=424)) > Leading companies don’t stop just at FCR, but actually think more about how to help customers avoid downstream issues. As a customer, imagine how refreshing it would be to have a service 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, ([Location 429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=429)) > Not only are customer preferences shifting away from live service, but the way in which customers want to engage with companies through new self-serve channels is exactly the opposite of what most service leaders assume. ([Location 455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=455)) > 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. ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=461)) > Instead of optimizing for satisfaction, if you’re correctly optimizing for loyalty, it’s obvious that what you need to focus on is finding new ways to get rid of the hassles, the hurdles, the extra customer effort that leads to disloyalty. ([Location 494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=494)) > The argument of this book, put in its most simple form, is that the role of customer service is to mitigate disloyalty by reducing customer effort. ([Location 521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=521)) > so ambiguous as to be almost indefinable. On the other hand, when we look at the effort drivers—repeat contacts, transfers, channel switching—these are real things that are much more black-and-white. ([Location 532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=532)) > avoiding situations where the customer is likely to have to call back, not transferring customers when they can handle the issue themselves, not asking customers to repeat themselves, not treating people in a generic manner, and so forth. ([Location 548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=548)) > If you’ve taken nothing else from the discussion in this chapter, you should at least now know that a strategy of delight doesn’t work—for three reasons: It doesn’t work because delighting customers is rare, and even when delight does occur, it doesn’t make customers much more loyal than simply meeting their expectations does. It doesn’t work because customer service interactions are four times more likely to drive disloyalty than loyalty. It doesn’t work because optimizing toward delight doesn’t focus any of our resources, investments, performance metrics, and incentives on reducing and eliminating the sources of customer effort that make customers disloyal. ([Location 566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=566)) > Low-effort companies minimize channel switching by boosting the “stickiness” of self-service channels, thereby keeping customers from having to call in the first place. ([Location 586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=586)) > When customers are forced to call, low-effort companies don’t just resolve the current issue for a customer; they arm their reps to head off the potential for subsequent calls by employing next issue avoidance practices. ([Location 591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=591)) > experience engineering tactics that allow reps to actively manage the customer interaction. ([Location 596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=596)) > Finally, low-effort companies empower their frontline reps to deliver a low-effort experience by using incentive systems that value the quality of the experience over merely speed and efficiency. ([Location 597](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=597)) > we go out of our way to self-serve. ([Location 622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=622)) > 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 ([Location 655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=655)) > As it turns out, a customer who hears the question, “Have I fully resolved your issue today?” would be better off by responding, “I dunno, is there anything else I should be asking you? Is there anything you can anticipate or clarify right now before I hang up the phone so that I don’t have to call back in three days?” ([Location 1116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1116)) > Next issue avoidance is very different. It starts with a totally different mind-set. Reps are trained and coached to ask themselves, “How can I make sure this customer doesn’t have to call us back?” ([Location 1169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1169)) > just didn’t make sense to forward-resolve more than one step at a time at the risk of overwhelming the customer. So they forward-resolve only the immediate adjacent issues. ([Location 1236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1236)) > The company only forward-resolves the highest-probability adjacent issues. ([Location 1238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1238)) > Rule #3: Don’t forward-resolve complex issues on the phone. ([Location 1242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1242)) > So instead of confusing customers during a phone call, the rep explains how they’ll follow up with a simple e-mail that details what to expect on the billing statement. ([Location 1243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1243)) > Effort, it turns out, isn’t mostly about what customers have to do. While that’s certainly a critical part of the effort story, customer effort is actually mostly about how customers feel. ([Location 1413](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1413)) > there is compelling evidence that if the goal is effort reduction, just getting reps to be nicer to people doesn’t have much of an impact at all. ([Location 1424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1424)) > If you’re betting on soft skills training, you’re very likely to lose the battle for customer loyalty. ([Location 1434](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1434)) > We call it experience engineering, since that is precisely what is being done—managing or engineering a conversation using carefully selected language to improve how the customer interprets what they’re being told. ([Location 1449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1449)) > We define experience engineering as “An approach to actively guide a customer through an interaction that is designed to anticipate the emotional response and preemptively offer solutions that create a mutually beneficial resolution.” ([Location 1502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1502)) > Reducing the interpretation of effort, particularly in situations where there’s nothing else that can be done to reduce exertion, is the ultimate win-win-win—best for the customer, best for the company, and best for the individual reps who are in the hot seat delivering bad news on a daily basis. ([Location 1527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1527)) > This is why at high-CQ companies, the achievement of consistently excellent service could never—by definition—be accomplished by treating all customers the same. Because all customers are not the same. Customers have different personalities, different needs, different expectations. Their ability to understand and verbalize their problems and issues is very different. Their level of experience with your company and your products is widely variable. If there’s anything that’s consistent from one customer to the next, it’s that they each want to interact with a rep who understands them uniquely. ([Location 2039](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2039)) > The new CES metric is based on a statement, “The company made it easy for me to handle my issue,” after which the customer is asked to answer (on a common 1–7 scale used in most customer service surveys) whether they agree or disagree with statement. ([Location 2402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2402)) > So the company rethought their entire approach to new hire training and onboarding, instead teaching new hires how to handle only the ten most common issue types, beginning to end. ([Location 2701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2701)) > A certified call coach was dedicated to helping the new hire group. This call coach would join calls for these rarer issue types. In most instances, the coach would help guide the rep through the interaction, but in some instances the coach would just take over the call and tell the new hire to just listen in. But in all instances, the coach would immediately debrief with the rep to discuss what happened and what could or should have happened differently. ([Location 2707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2707)) > Coaching is focused on improving future performance, using past examples to illustrate the point. ([Location 2724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2724)) > If there’s only one thing your organization prioritizes as you pilot and initially roll out effort reduction, it needs to be coaching. ([Location 2760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2760)) > Customer effort diaries. ([Location 2785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2785)) --- Title: The Effortless Experience Author: Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, Rick DeLisi Tags: readwise, books date: 2024-01-30 --- # The Effortless Experience  Author:: Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, Rick DeLisi ## AI-Generated Summary None ## Highlights > defining loyalty in terms of three specific behaviors: repurchase (customers continue to buy from your company), share of wallet (customers buy more from you over time), and advocacy (customers say good things about your company to family, friends, coworkers, even to strangers). ([Location 162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=162)) > Once you’re consistently meeting the expectations of the majority of your customers, you’ve already done the most economically valuable thing you can do. ([Location 278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=278)) > What we find is that the specific things customer service does to drive disloyalty among customers are largely associated with the amount of work—or effort—customers must put forth to get their issues resolved. ([Location 424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=424)) > Leading companies don’t stop just at FCR, but actually think more about how to help customers avoid downstream issues. As a customer, imagine how refreshing it would be to have a service 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, ([Location 429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=429)) > Not only are customer preferences shifting away from live service, but the way in which customers want to engage with companies through new self-serve channels is exactly the opposite of what most service leaders assume. ([Location 455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=455)) > 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. ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=461)) > Instead of optimizing for satisfaction, if you’re correctly optimizing for loyalty, it’s obvious that what you need to focus on is finding new ways to get rid of the hassles, the hurdles, the extra customer effort that leads to disloyalty. ([Location 494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=494)) > The argument of this book, put in its most simple form, is that the role of customer service is to mitigate disloyalty by reducing customer effort. ([Location 521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=521)) > so ambiguous as to be almost indefinable. On the other hand, when we look at the effort drivers—repeat contacts, transfers, channel switching—these are real things that are much more black-and-white. ([Location 532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=532)) > avoiding situations where the customer is likely to have to call back, not transferring customers when they can handle the issue themselves, not asking customers to repeat themselves, not treating people in a generic manner, and so forth. ([Location 548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=548)) > If you’ve taken nothing else from the discussion in this chapter, you should at least now know that a strategy of delight doesn’t work—for three reasons: It doesn’t work because delighting customers is rare, and even when delight does occur, it doesn’t make customers much more loyal than simply meeting their expectations does. It doesn’t work because customer service interactions are four times more likely to drive disloyalty than loyalty. It doesn’t work because optimizing toward delight doesn’t focus any of our resources, investments, performance metrics, and incentives on reducing and eliminating the sources of customer effort that make customers disloyal. ([Location 566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=566)) > Low-effort companies minimize channel switching by boosting the “stickiness” of self-service channels, thereby keeping customers from having to call in the first place. ([Location 586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=586)) > When customers are forced to call, low-effort companies don’t just resolve the current issue for a customer; they arm their reps to head off the potential for subsequent calls by employing next issue avoidance practices. ([Location 591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=591)) > experience engineering tactics that allow reps to actively manage the customer interaction. ([Location 596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=596)) > Finally, low-effort companies empower their frontline reps to deliver a low-effort experience by using incentive systems that value the quality of the experience over merely speed and efficiency. ([Location 597](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=597)) > we go out of our way to self-serve. ([Location 622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=622)) > 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 ([Location 655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=655)) > As it turns out, a customer who hears the question, “Have I fully resolved your issue today?” would be better off by responding, “I dunno, is there anything else I should be asking you? Is there anything you can anticipate or clarify right now before I hang up the phone so that I don’t have to call back in three days?” ([Location 1116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1116)) > Next issue avoidance is very different. It starts with a totally different mind-set. Reps are trained and coached to ask themselves, “How can I make sure this customer doesn’t have to call us back?” ([Location 1169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1169)) > just didn’t make sense to forward-resolve more than one step at a time at the risk of overwhelming the customer. So they forward-resolve only the immediate adjacent issues. ([Location 1236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1236)) > The company only forward-resolves the highest-probability adjacent issues. ([Location 1238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1238)) > Rule #3: Don’t forward-resolve complex issues on the phone. ([Location 1242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1242)) > So instead of confusing customers during a phone call, the rep explains how they’ll follow up with a simple e-mail that details what to expect on the billing statement. ([Location 1243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1243)) > Effort, it turns out, isn’t mostly about what customers have to do. While that’s certainly a critical part of the effort story, customer effort is actually mostly about how customers feel. ([Location 1413](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1413)) > there is compelling evidence that if the goal is effort reduction, just getting reps to be nicer to people doesn’t have much of an impact at all. ([Location 1424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1424)) > If you’re betting on soft skills training, you’re very likely to lose the battle for customer loyalty. ([Location 1434](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1434)) > We call it experience engineering, since that is precisely what is being done—managing or engineering a conversation using carefully selected language to improve how the customer interprets what they’re being told. ([Location 1449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1449)) > We define experience engineering as “An approach to actively guide a customer through an interaction that is designed to anticipate the emotional response and preemptively offer solutions that create a mutually beneficial resolution.” ([Location 1502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1502)) > Reducing the interpretation of effort, particularly in situations where there’s nothing else that can be done to reduce exertion, is the ultimate win-win-win—best for the customer, best for the company, and best for the individual reps who are in the hot seat delivering bad news on a daily basis. ([Location 1527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=1527)) > This is why at high-CQ companies, the achievement of consistently excellent service could never—by definition—be accomplished by treating all customers the same. Because all customers are not the same. Customers have different personalities, different needs, different expectations. Their ability to understand and verbalize their problems and issues is very different. Their level of experience with your company and your products is widely variable. If there’s anything that’s consistent from one customer to the next, it’s that they each want to interact with a rep who understands them uniquely. ([Location 2039](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2039)) > The new CES metric is based on a statement, “The company made it easy for me to handle my issue,” after which the customer is asked to answer (on a common 1–7 scale used in most customer service surveys) whether they agree or disagree with statement. ([Location 2402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2402)) > So the company rethought their entire approach to new hire training and onboarding, instead teaching new hires how to handle only the ten most common issue types, beginning to end. ([Location 2701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2701)) > A certified call coach was dedicated to helping the new hire group. This call coach would join calls for these rarer issue types. In most instances, the coach would help guide the rep through the interaction, but in some instances the coach would just take over the call and tell the new hire to just listen in. But in all instances, the coach would immediately debrief with the rep to discuss what happened and what could or should have happened differently. ([Location 2707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2707)) > Coaching is focused on improving future performance, using past examples to illustrate the point. ([Location 2724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2724)) > If there’s only one thing your organization prioritizes as you pilot and initially roll out effort reduction, it needs to be coaching. ([Location 2760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2760)) > Customer effort diaries. ([Location 2785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00C5R73I8&location=2785))