Leadership Lessons Blog

Achieving Customer Loyalty

  

  

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A recent article in the Harvard Business Review written by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman state the following:   "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers."  The authors go on to state, "what most people really want--but rarely get--is just a quick, easy solution to their service issues.  Here are five quick tips every company should adopt according to the authors. 

To really win customer loyalty, get back to the basics.

1. Don't just resolve the current issue--head off the next one.  The biggest cause of excessive customer effort is the need to call back.  If you do a good job at customer service you should have some mechanism to capture the customer issue without having them repeat it.  When you pick up the phone you own the customer issue and the follow up, to ensure that you close the loop with the customer. 
2. Arm representatives to address the emotional side of customer interactions.  Avoid words like "can't," "won't," and "don't,"--use alternate phrasing.  Instead of saying, "we don't have that item in stock," a rep might explain, "we'll have that item in stock in two weeks."  Simple changes in how reps respond to customers decreases their emotions and helps them focus on what you helped them accomplish.
3. Minimize channel switching by incrreasing self-service channel stickiness.  Don't overwhelm your customers with multiple interactive self-service options.  Customers are bombarded with social media such as Facebook,Twitter, and so on---they don't always know the right resource for them.  Work on the help section of your websites so that customers know how to find what they need quickly. 
4. Use feedback from disgruntled or struggling customers to reducde customer effort.  Many companies survey their customers, but then never use the information they have been given.  If companies receive poor scores on surveys, representatives need to be taught how to make calls to those customers to resolve their problems.  This approach solves three problems:  it helps the customer believe you care about what information they have provided, you are able to collect more data and you are resolving the current problem and avoiding the potential for additional problems
5. Empower the front line to deliver a low effort experience.  Don't value speed over quality.  If you want to reduce customer satisfaction issues, empower your representatives to spend quality time on the call.  Ensure that they ask the customer, if the service they provided met their needs.  EVERY outbound customer call should end the same way.  DID WE SATISFY YOUR NEEDS?  So many companies don't take advantage of asking this critical question when they have the opportunity to. 

The bottom line:  reduce customer effort and you increase customer loyalty and build a much stronger customer service organization.