Quit Trying to Exceed and Just Make It Easy.

I read an illuminating piece in the Harvard Business Review today that promotes a new perspective in approaching customer service. The article, Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers, written by Matthew Dixon, Nicholas Freeman and Karen Toman, examines the impact on organizations and their customers when the emphasis is placed on over-the-top service. What they found is surprising.

The research, (conducted on more than 75,000 people), found that telling employees to provide over-the-top service generally produces little more than a state of confusion, and it doesn’t build customer loyalty. In addition, there is little correlation between satisfaction and loyalty. We tend to buy from a company because it delivers quality products, great value or a compelling brand. We leave, more often than not, because it fails to deliver on customer service. So, while customer service can do little to increase loyalty, it can do a great deal to undermine it. Customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal than loyal.

When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily.
For example,

Don’t just resolve the issue, head off the next. For example, simply providing an in-person apartment “tutorial” (i.e. how to shut off the water, reset the garbage disposal, etc) can head off future calls.
Arm your people to address the emotional side of customer interactions. Are your front line people trained in interpersonal communication skills? (This includes maintenance - they get more “face time” than anybody else.) Are they aware of words that can trigger negative reactions, (can’t, won’t, policy), and how to turn negative statements into positive? For example, instead of, “I can’t fix your garbage disposal - I need to order a part.”, say, “This challenge is repairable, and we will be able to get the part needed by Thursday and repair it that same day.” Remember, it’s not so much what is said, as how it is said.
Use feedback from unhappy residents to reduce customer effort. In addition to working with the resident to solve the challenge, collect feedback that informs service improvements. Use the feedback to streamline and create ease of use.
In a self-serve world, is your website cutting it? Spend as much time making your website intuitive and functional as you do pretty. How easy is it to use your website and get what you need from a resident’s perspective? If they get stuck, is it easy to get help?
Empower your team to deliver a low-effort experience. Innovative companies have stopped measuring outdated metrics based on productivity and evaluate on the basis of short, direct customer interviews with customers, essentially asking them if the service they received met their needs. Others are evaluating, not based on call time, but on how many repeat calls are received.

Finally, the research revealed although most companies believe that customers overwhelmingly prefer live phone service to self-service, that customers are, in fact, indifferent. (This could be a result of frustration with past interactions, in my opinion). This is an important paradigm shift and innovative companies will build their organizations around self-service, with reducing customer effort at its core.

My opinion? While I love over-the-top service interactions, this concept is a far more concrete, tangible, consistent and teachable approach to delivering service excellence and provides a very easy barometer by which to gauge policy and effectiveness. It’s the little things that matter. How easy are you to do business with? How easy is it for a resident to get a request or complaint handled ? Teach your people to make it easy, base policy on ease of use, and loyalty will result.