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

Portfolio/Penguin, September 2013
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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.