The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty
The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty book cover

The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

Hardcover – September 12, 2013

by
Price
$18.17
Format
Hardcover
Pages
256
Publisher
Portfolio
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-1591845812
Dimensions
6.2 x 1.03 x 9.28 inches
Weight
15.5 ounces

Description

“This is what every business book should be like: stuffed with practical advice, wellsupportedxa0by research, and written to keep you eagerly flipping the pages.” — DAN HEATH , coauthor of Decisive, Switch, and Made to Stick , from the foreword “Most current customer support and customer experience improvement programs arexa0merely replays of age-old concepts with some new terminology thrown in. The customerxa0effort research and approach recounted here is different. It is truly the first really novelxa0idea that I’ve heard—and implemented—in a long time. This is an approach that drivesxa0innovative, significant improvement within my teams . . . actions grounded in solid data . . .xa0actions that yield measurable, customer-visible results that we just couldn’t achieve viaxa0other means. It really has changed the way I think about the support my team delivers.” — DAN ROURKE , director of software support, HomeAway, Inc. “A must-have for any true customer experience leader’s library. Matt, Nick, and Rick arexa0the ‘MythBusters’ of customer experience, dispelling many commonly held but inaccuratexa0beliefs around the drivers of disloyalty and delight and what will really drive true valuexa0to your business.”— LYNN HOLMGREN , vice president, customerxa0experience strategy, Frontier Communications “If you are looking for one resource to keep on your desk that will bring you back to thexa0right focus for delivering a better customer service, this is that resource.” — CHRIS HALE , vice president, reservation services, Hyatt “Every business is looking for the secret to creating loyal customers. This book not onlyxa0builds a compelling case for effortless customer experiences being the key to loyalty, butxa0also provides a clear road map for any business to achieve that goal. It’s a must-read!” — DEB OLER , vice president and general manager, Grainger Brand, W. W. Grainger “What’s brilliant about The Effortless Experience is its pragmatism, illustrated by the observationxa0that we can easily make things worse for customers and often do more harmxa0than good. Here is real, practical, implementable guidance to help avoid those pitfalls.” — RICHARD JOYCE , operations director, Home Retail Group Customer Services “ The Effortless Experience provides a well-researched foundation for customer experiencexa0transformation. Reducing customer effort links the work of the service organization toxa0the business-wide goal of increasing customer loyalty. The concepts themselves arexa0pragmatic and actionable and this book will get you under way.” — SUE ATKINS , head of service experience, Telecom NZ Ltd MATTHEW DIXON is executive director ofxa0the Sales & Service Practice of CEB. He is axa0frequent contributor to Harvard Businessxa0Review , and his previous book, The Challengerxa0Sale , was a Wall Street Journal bestsellerxa0and won acclaim as “the most important advance in sellingxa0for many years” (Neil Rackham) and “the beginningxa0of a wave that will take over a lot of selling organizationsxa0in the next decade” ( Business Insider ). NICK TOMAN is senior director of researchxa0for CEB’s Sales & Service Practice and is a frequentxa0contributor to Harvard Business Review . RICK DELISI is senior director of advisoryxa0services for CEB’s Sales & Service Practicexa0and a noted public speaker and facilitator. CEB is the leading member-based advisory company.xa0By combining the best practices of thousands of memberxa0companies with its advanced research methodologiesxa0and human capital analytics, CEB equips seniorxa0leaders and their teams with insight and actionablexa0solutions to transform operations.

Features & Highlights

  • Everyone knows that the best way to create customer loyalty is with service so good, so over the top, that it surprises and delights.
  • But what if everyone is wrong?
  • In their acclaimed bestseller
  • The Challenger Sale
  • , Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted many longstanding myths about sales. Now they’ve turned their research and analysis to a new vital business subject—customer loyalty—with a new book that turns the conventional wisdom on its head.
  • The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it. They devote untold time, energy, and resources to trying to dazzle people and inspire their undying loyalty. Yet CEB’s careful research over five years and tens of thousands of respondents proves that the “dazzle factor” is wildly overrated—it simply doesn’t predict repeat sales, share of wallet, or positive wordof-mouth. The reality:
  • Loyalty is driven by how well a company delivers on its basic promises and solves day-to-day problems, not on how spectacular its service experience might be.
  • Most customers don’t want to be “wowed”; they want an effortless experience.
  • And they are far more likely to punish you for bad service than to reward you for good service.
  • If you put on your customer hat rather than your manager or marketer hat, this makes a lot of sense. What do you really want from your cable company, a free month of HBO when it screws up or a fast, painless restoration of your connection? What about your bank—do you want free cookies and a cheerful smile, even a personal relationship with your teller? Or just a quick in-and-out transaction and an easy way to get a refund when it accidentally overcharges on fees?
  • The Effortless Experience
  • takes readers on a fascinating journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes customers loyal—and disloyal. 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 revealed by CEB’s research, with great results. And they include 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.  The rewards are there for the taking, and the pathway to achieving them is now clearly marked.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
60%
(422)
★★★★
25%
(176)
★★★
15%
(105)
★★
7%
(49)
★
-7%
(-49)

Most Helpful Reviews

✓ Verified Purchase

Started useful, but then authors' tone changed

The book was an interesting read in the beginning, pointing out useful ideas to ponder for changing the way customers are helped with product or service obstacles.

There was switch in tone however, where the authors turned the book into a self-marketing asset to promote their consulting services. For example as they stated, "regardless of whether we do this for you or you do it on your own using the tools and methods described in this book" (p. 171).

And at one point, the authors made the comment about front-line support representative , "You're corporate. They're not" (p. 195). This seemed a bit divisive.

Take a read and then judge if it was really worth the investment.
21 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

There's some good stuff in here!

My manager "recommended" (ahem!) that I read this before my first meeting with the new "director". I went into it with a so-so attitude. I'm always happy to learn and I am really and truly invested in improving our customer experience but I get so tired of corporate games. I'm only halfway through but there's actually some good stuff in here! I've said for years that customers don't want to be "delighted"...they just want one less hassle in their day. Make their lives easier somehow and they don't care about rainbows and unicorns. You can "wow" one customer in a hundred or you can satisfy 90 in a hundred. If the opportunity to "wow" arises, great, jump on it, but there are so many things we can do every day to reduce customer effort and we need to! (I'm the QR lead at a startup software company...reviewing our CS interactions and TRYING to train agents and improve the customer experience)
16 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

The Effortless Experience is Delightful!

Earlier this year, I read the book The Effortless Experience by M. Dixon, N. Toman and R. DeLisi. The authors compiled some terrific research - really enlightening stuff - but in their zeal to write a provocative book that challenges conventional thinking, they've lumped every conceivable customer service action into the category of "delight" (which they translate into breathless, over-the-top service).

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the book (hence the 5-star review). I just thought it got much better after Ch. 1 - where the authors worked awfully hard trying to persuade readers that "delighting" customers was somehow a poor use of their time and energy.

Perhaps you're familiar with the customer service maxim to "treat every customer as though he/she is your grandparent"? Well, I put a slightly different spin on that. I think about serving customers as I would serve any other person in my life whom I value (friends, neighbors, children, spouses...).

With this in mind, consider the following paragraph from Ch. 1:

"But as powerful and compelling as (legendary customer service) stories are, what if you checked back with those same customers a year or two down the road to see how much more business they're bringing you? Because the data shows that in the aggregate, customers who are moved from a level of `below expectations' up to `meets expectations' offer about the same economic value as those whose expectations were exceeded."

Imagine applying this logic to your marriage: "Honey, from now on I'm going to focus on meeting your expectations as opposed to exceeding them. I read this great new book called The Effortless Marriage and I'm now convinced that there's no real value to exceeding your expectations by `delighting' you with love notes, roses, and that sort of nonsense. So, what's for dinner?"

In The Effortless Experience, the authors rebuke those service providers who "delight" their customers (for example, by expressing genuine interest in them or providing them with a pleasant surprise) as misguided. Instead, the authors advocate for reducing customer effort. As most reasonable customer service professionals understand, it doesn't have to be one or the other (delight customers OR reduce customer effort). It can be both.

In fact, as a customer myself, I'm "delighted" whenever a service provider reduces the effort I have to expend during a transaction. And I'm sure I'm not alone.
16 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

Resonates in our environment just as The Challenger Sale did!

My copy of the book arrived on Friday night after a long work week, I picked it up and like The Challenger Sale, I just kept reading ... so many insights backed by exhaustive research. The book uses many B2C examples which I still found applicable to my B2B environment. The idea of minimizing customer effort in resolving issues applies to all environments -- contact center, live service - it does not matter -- we all want less "hassle" factor in our lives, at home and at work!
9 people found this helpful
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Too Often We're Solving The Wrong Problem

Too often, we're solving the wrong problem! We think customers want a delightful customer service experience. We design our processes, train our people, measure them on delighting the customer. We implement self service tools, web conferencing, provide the latest in technology all in the spirit of serving the customer.

At the same time, we are trying to make our customer service organizations as cost effective and efficient as possible. So our customer service strategies are constrained, rightfully so, by our business strategies.

But is this really the right problem to be solving? Is this what customers really want. Yes, they absolutely want to be treated well, by skilled and polite people. But more then anything else, they want their problem solved---as quickly and effortlessly as possible.

And that's where we go wrong in so many cases. We are solving for the wrong problem. If we started focusing on effortless customer service experience, we would probably change everything we do. We would possibly reduce the cost of service delivery, more effectively drive customer loyalty, and so on.

This book turns much of our traditional thinking about customer service upside down. It provides data challenging old thoughts about a "delighted customer" is a loyal customer--both spending more and recommending you more.

This is a must read and think book for anyone in Customer Service. It's a must read book for every sales and marketing executive. It should stimulate everyone to question their assumptions, reframing what they do to create effortless experiences.
8 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

Candid, Practical and Very Useful

In their excellent book, The Effortless Experience, authors Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick Delisi make the convincing case that, “...the Holy Grail of service isn’t delight, but customer relief.” “The truest test of a company’s ability to delight,” they go on to say, “is when things go wrong.” In a survey of 97,000 consumers who purchased products or services from over 400 companies around the world, Dixon and his co-authors found that, “there is virtually no difference at all between the loyalty of those customers whose expectations are exceeded, and those whose expectations are simply met.” That’s a profound finding for several reasons, perhaps most notably, because it implies that spending time, effort, and usually (big) money to develop a “wow” experience, may not be so beneficial after all. As a corollary to this, the authors say, “...basic competence, professional service, , getting the fundamentals right...it turns out that these things really do matter, maybe even more than we’d led ourselves to believe.”

The Effortless Experience focus primarily on the activities occurring in a company’s call center, but, in my opinion, that really doesn’t do the book full justice, as the conclusions and prescriptions presented can be applied to most other customer experience settings.

My epiphany in reading The Effortless Experience came from this quote on page 23, “...we pick companies because of their product (or service, or brand, or price - my addition), but we often leave them because of their service failures.” On the surface, this seems plainly intuitive, but think again about the organizational tendency to assess things relative to the “wow” experience. In other words, I would venture that many companies think their customers defect (if they even think about defection at all) because they just aren’t providing enough memorable, fireworks exploding, champagne popping experiences.

The book concludes with a fine chapter presenting the Customer Effort Score, which again based on the authors’ rigorous research, can serve as a useful indicator or proxy for customer satisfaction. This is then followed by comprehensive and robust appendices containing many of the survey and problem resolution tools discussed throughout the preceding chapters (these alone are worth the price of the book).

The Effortless Experience is a significant contribution to the customer experience literature, and I strongly recommend it particularly to marketers, researchers retailers and service center staff who routinely deal with front-line customer issues.
4 people found this helpful
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Articulates what matters most to consumers today!

This book totally made sense to me. It so wonderfully articulates what matters most to consumers today and it appropriately puts paid to the notion of giving customers a "wow" experience, when all they want to do is to get on with their lives. Great read!
Peter Smith, Author, Hiring Squirrels
3 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

2nd best book in the world after the Bible.

If you have any leadership role at an organization, if you're in marketing, or customer service, this is a must-read book. Great insights on how effort and loyalty (and brand experience) are tied together.
2 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

Worth the read

Good read. Interesting research. The point behind it is that instead of wow-ing customers, companies should focus on providing an effortless experience. The book argues that making it easy to do business with gets repeat business. There is a great HBR article that sums up the book.
2 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

Great

Used it to get my CCXP, great book.
1 people found this helpful

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