The 10 Commandments for Effortless Customer Service

While most brands invest in “delighting” customers to keep them happy, it’s actually largely overlooked by customers, drives up operating costs, and isn’t a key driver of loyalty.

–CEB Global

Focusing on customer delight is a bit like treating customers as if you’ll never see them again. If you worry about delighting them in a particular moment in time, but aren’t concerned about a long-term relationship, where does that leave you?

–Joellyn Sargent, Claravon Group

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The Reality:

Customers who have high-effort service experiences report being more disloyal and spending less than those who have low-effort experiences.

Conversely, customers who experience low-effort service are 94% more likely to repurchase, are only 9% disloyal, and just 1% are likely to spread negative word of mouth.

Even if you are hyper-focused on delighting customers but are making them jump through hoops to get help, you’re at risk of losing that customer.

If you do want to give customers a complimentary voucher, loyalty points, or bend the rules slightly in their favor, make sure you’re also providing them with an effortless experience.

So, what elements are needed to operationalize low-effort experiences that value customers’ time?

1.Don’t make customers have to contact you repeatedly or transfer them from one agent to another to get an issue resolved.

2.Don’t make them switch from one channel to another for no other reason than technology limitations.

3.Don’t make them repeat information about who they are and their previous interactions with your company.

4.Don’t auto-respond with canned messages on social channels and make them go to your preferred channels for help.

5.Don’t let policies and processes based off phone channels dictate how you provide digital service.  

6.Don’t limit what social/mobile service agents can do on these channels. If you’re there, serve customers in the same way as any other channel.

7.Hire a skilled and knowledgeable social customer service team and trust them to deliver care in an unscripted environment.

8.Monitor response and resolution times like your customers’ lifecycle depends on it - because it does.

9.Collect personally identifiable information (PII) securely on all social channels.

10.Let customer feedback be your compass: CSAT and NPS will deliver insights you can use immediately to improve customer experience and reduce effort along the customer journey.

Want to learn more about how you can create an effortless experience for your customers?

Watch our webinar, “Taking Customer Loyalty to New Heights: How JetBlue Built a Low Effort Service Organization

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