Tag: Customer Experience

The Effortless Experience

The Effortless Experience

by akc

The Effortless Experience, by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi

Portfolio/Penguin, September 2013
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

As I read The Customer of the Future, this book kept coming to mind so I decided to revisit it. At the time I first read The Effortless Experience, my team and I were just starting the process of choosing and configuring a new support system. It was interesting to re-read this on the other side of that experience, having overhauled the support program and gotten it to a much more sustainable place. I remember my first read of it was very positive, and it helped to develop my mindset as I went into the project.

While it’s focused on call centers and support by phone, the authors do go into some research around how consumer preferences were shifting from phone to web. For myself, I found that subbing “cases” for “calls” as I read worked just fine. A lot of the concepts apply to support in general, regardless of channel. The details would differ in implementation, but they would anyway.

One of the biggest takeaways from this is the research they did that debunks the idea that exceeding customer expectations is the best way to ensure customer loyalty. They found that customer behavior plateaus when you meet expectations, and doesn’t significantly rise if you’re exceeding them. Consistently exceeding expectations is costly, and to some extent just continues to raise the bar, constantly resetting the baseline expectations of your customers. Really, customers just want you to be easy to deal with, something I’m sure we can all agree with as customers ourselves.

They developed a measure for this called the Customer Effort Score, which you can obtain with a single survey question asking the customer how easy you made it for them to deal with their issue. You can collect that alongside your standard satisfaction measure and get a better picture of what’s going on.

The concepts presented in The Effortless Experience are well-researched and presented clearly. They’re backed up with data, and the authors include some very useful looking worksheets in an appendix.

This is a quick read, and I’d recommend it for anyone working in support, not just team leaders and managers. Re-reading it I found that I wished I’d treated it as a reference after that initial read, as there were some ideas that would have been helpful for us as we developed some training for team members and built new business processes.

For a great preview of the book, check out this article in Harvard Business Review, written by some of the book’s authors in 2010: Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers.

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The Customer of the Future

The Customer of the Future

by akc ♥ 1 Comment

The Customer of the Future: 10 Guiding Principles for Winning Tomorrow’s Business, by Blake Morgan

Harper Collins Leadership, October 2019
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

This book provides a framework to explore the ways your organization can improve the customer experience. Morgan’s prose is straightforward and engaging, and she clearly outlines the concepts she’s covering. There’s jargon of course, but it’s used appropriately – this isn’t one of those business books that’s full of acronyms and hollow phrases. The case studies provided enough detail that you could glean some useful info from them. 

For me, the biggest takeaways were some clear, short statements around what it takes to be focused on the customer. First, that most companies are product-focused, not customer-focused. In order to be customer-focused, every decision needs to be made based on what’s best for the customer, not what’s best for the revenue stream or even the company. She notes that it takes a willingness to focus on long-term value at the expense of short-term profits. That needs strong leadership, with goals and KPIs that account for the approach. In this model, they truly a tool for leadership to incentivize and operationalize customer-focused actions. 

The second is that customers move horizontally, but companies organize vertically. I knew this, but I didn’t have a clear way of encapsulating the conflict I’ve seen between organizational structure and the customer journey. If you’ve organized for internal operational efficiencies, your customers are going to have a disjointed experience. Thus, the best way to improve the customer experience is to organize to support the customer journey. The challenge here is that it means the employees are likely to feel the friction, and without good management and an internal commitment to addressing the friction, you have a new problem.

The last one I’ll mention is the observation that companies need to treat digital transformation as a state of mind, not an initiative. I’m not the only one who’s seen how you can catch up on significant technical debt or launch a suite of product improvements and still be behind the curve. The curve keeps moving while you’re catching up! To actually get ahead of the curve, or at least keep up with it, you have to constantly innovate. A model where you’re launching big improvements and going into maintenance mode for two years won’t position you to meet customer expectations in three years. 

As Morgan notes, becoming a customer-focused organization is “not easy, but it is simple.” Maybe you can’t rebuild your entire internal infrastructure to ensure employees have more customer data at their fingertips. But you can start prioritizing the customer over the company in making decisions about product roadmaps and allocating resources. You can lift your strategic gaze to look farther out as you set goals. This book will help you start.