The Effortless Experience Review & Summary

Rating: Good

The Effortless Experience burb excerpt: The Effortless Experience takes readers on a fascinating journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes customers loyal—and disloyal. Uncovering what factors in a customer lifecycle can help predict repeat sales, the share of wallet, or positive word-of-mouth. The authors lay out the four key pillars of a low-effort customer experience, along the way delivering robust data, shocking insights, and profiles of companies that are already using the principles. This book includes many tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, decrease customer churn, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the “dazzle factor” fails to deliver.

My opinion: The research presented in this book shows that going above and beyond for a customer has minimal impact on their loyalty. What customers truly value are "effortless experiences". This book validates this statement through data and showcases numerous ways to improve the experience of your customers. I enjoyed the book. Is it one of The Best Sales Books or Best Business Books? Probably not. But I did take away some really valuable insights. If it weren't so dry it would have been an excellent resource.

Buy Your Copy

Lessons from The Effortless Experience:

When a customer requires service, the resulting interactions are four times more likely to drive disloyalty instead of increasing a customer’s loyalty.

So how are companies creating low-effort service for their customers? They’re putting systems in place to allow customers to help themselves. They’re finding out the real issue – not just the customer’s stated request. They’re engineering the customer experience to reduce perceived effort. And they’re empowering their front-line employees to make it happen.

4 Key takeaways from the books:

1. A strategy of delight doesn’t pay.

2. Satisfaction is not a predictor of loyalty.

3. Customer service interactions tend to drive disloyalty, not loyalty.

4. The key to mitigating disloyalty is reducing customer effort.

4 things that cause customer disloyalty:

1. Having to contact the company more than once to resolve the problem.

2. Generic service – minimal or no personalization.

3. Having to repeat things details more than once.

4. Channel-switching (going from FAQ to chat to email to phone, etc.)

5 things you can do at the rep level to create low-effort experience’s:

1. Engage the customer – use a professional, courteous and engaging tone.

2. Identify their needs – practice active listening and ask questions to clarify.

3. Offer relevant options – give the customer a few choices that are relevant to their needs.

4. Inform the customer – take on the role of expert by sharing relevant information with the customer to make choosing easier.

5. Show commitment – let the customer know what actions you have taken, how these actions support their needs and play the advocate by letting them know what you can do for them instead of what you cannot.

4 practices common to low-effort service organizations:

1. Minimize channel switching by making it easy for people to self-serve or have first contact resolution via their chosen channel.

2. Don’t just resolve the current issue but set agents up to prevent future calls by using next issue avoidance practices. These are recommendations based on what issues frequently cause customers to come back for service. Forward resolve only the immediately adjacent issue. Don’t forward-resolve complex issues on the phone; though OK to do so via short, well-timed emails

3. Set agents up to use advanced “experience engineering” tactics to manage the customer interaction and create a good emotional experience for the customer.

4. Incentivize agents to optimize for quality of the experience over speed and efficiency, which also tends to include giving agents some autonomy.

Measure the following 3 things:

1. Overall loyalty using a metric like NPS

2. Effort in service transactions using Customer Effort Score (CES) as a metric.

3. The customer’s service journey – how many touchpoints? Of what type? Via which channels? In what sequence?

Set a seven- to a fourteen-day window for tracking call-backs.

Say “No” in a way that is accepted by the customer:

• No one likes telling a customer “No” and no customer likes hearing “No”, but sometimes that is the answer. What if there was another way to say “No” that your customers could accept? Even like? The authors share ways in which companies are saying “No” but still ensuring a positive experience for customers.

• The first is using positive language. Your first instinct is that you can’t honor the customer's request, but that’s no reason to say “No”. Instead, focus on what you can do. For example:

Instead of, “There are no appointments available this week”, say “I have an opening next week”.

Instead of, “Your order won’t be ready today”, say “Your order will be ready tomorrow morning”.

Anchoring: Position a given outcome as more positive and desirable by comparing it to another less desirable one (ex: If a customer's flight is canceled, say "I know I can get you on the 9 am tomorrow but let me see if I can get you on anything today... Looks like I can get you on the 9 pm flight today. Would that work?"

To get control, you have to give control: To allow service reps to tap into their full CQ (Control quotient - their ability to assess and control the situation) potential, companies need to exercise trust in rep judgment. Companies may consider de-emphasizing handle time, taking away the QA checklist, clarifying reps’ alignment between their actions and the company’s objectives, and allowing reps to tap into the collective experience and knowledge of their peers.

Traits common to people with high CQ: Curiosity, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Experimental

A further set of skills common to people with high CQ are:

• They demonstrate product knowledge.

• They demonstrate technological expertise.

• They communicate confidently.

• They communicate clearly.

• They ask good questions.

• They’re capable of multitasking

• They’re empathetic.

• They can flex to different personality types.

• They have a customer service ethic.

• They’re extroverted (they’re comfortable interacting with strangers).

• They advocate for the customer.

• They’re persuasive.

• They’re resilient.

• They’re able to handle high-pressure situations without becoming burned out.

• They take responsibility for their own actions.

• They respond well to constructive criticism by managers.

• They’re able to concentrate on tasks over extended periods of time.

3 environmental factors that we can influence to bring out these skills in our service team staff:

1. Trust customer service representative judgment.

2. Make sure they understand and are aligned with company goals.

3. Assure that they have a strong peer network.

The Effortless Experience Best Quotes:

• "We pick companies because of their products, but often leave them because of their service failures."

• "Just because there’s nothing you can do, doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do."

• "Customer service doesn’t drive loyalty, but it can be at the heart of disloyalty."

• "Effort is one-third ‘do’ and two-thirds ‘feel’."

• "Customers care far more about having their problem go away than about how they get to that outcome."

What Next:

If you are interested in this book, you may want to check out our list of reviewed Sales Books.

Buy Your Copy