Effortless Customer Service
What if delivering WOW customer service is all wrong for your business?
Engaging Tweets
When something goes wrong for a customer do you delight or ease the effort?
Customer delight will not bring your business success
Why risk the success of your business by focusing on customer delight
Because you want to please your customers focus on effort not delight
Make your customers experience effortless not delightful
Focus on the effort and less on the wow for your business to succeed
What happens when your focus is on your customers experience of your business?
The biggest pay-off for your business comes from your customers experience being effortless
What happens to your business when you make your customers experience effortless?
Do you really think your business success comes from wowing your customers?
If you want to keep your customers, then delight and wow are not words to be used
Start making your customers experience effortless and improve the bottom line of your business
How Lexus and FedEx are leading you astray when it comes to customer loyalty
Why does a low effort environment for your customer lead to better business success? =
When your customer has an effortless experience, your business will be more successful
When something goes wrong for your customer use it as an example of how little THEY have to do to resolve it…
Your business will be more successful if it is a ‘low effort’ business – but what does this mean?
Get rid of your customers hassles and hurdles and grow your business
Customer retention, increased profits and business growth – just from getting your customer service right.
The less effort your customers make the bigger your business success
Your business wins when you master the tools and techniques to deliver effortless customer service
Minimising the effort of your customers will maximise the profits of your business
Avoid the disloyalty effect by minimising the effort of your customers
Because your customers matter to the success of your business, make your customer service ‘low effort’
Effortless customer service means loyal customers and big profits for your business
The ‘low effort’ customer service approach – a business winner
If your customers don’t have to make an effort, they will buy from you again and again
Are you doing everything you can in your business to avoid the pitfalls of good customer service?
Don’t fall short of your customers’ expectations – 4 pitfalls to avoid for business success
Falling short of effortless customer service comes in 4 ways – avoid these 4 disloyalty drivers and your business succeeds
Stop hitting the same 4 issues when it comes to meeting your customers expectations
4 pitfalls to avoid if you want your business to deliver effortless customer service
Make your business win by avoiding the pitfalls of poor customer service
Help your customers avoid disloyalty by getting your customer service right
Make your business a success by making your customers loyal
Loyalty brings business success, but be careful to avoid the pitfalls along the way
What happens to your business success when you turn the customer service pitfalls into opportunities?
Start obsessing about customer loyalty in your business
How to start making your customer care as effort-free as possible in your business
Don’t be complacent when it comes to the care you give your customers
Which customer care priorities will give your business the biggest pay-off?
LinkedIn Updates
1) Customers will only stay loyal to a business if they have a good reason to. As a result, you have to work even harder to keep your customers and build their trust in you, your products and services and your team. Click here to learn how…
2) When something goes wrong for one of your customers, I am sure you and your team work very hard to put it right and ‘wow’ them with your memorable customer care. It sounds like the right thing to do, you sort the problem out and ‘delight’ them with the level of care you have provided.
But what if it’s not enough if you want to win customer loyalty? Click here to learn why delight will not win you the loyalty of your customers.
3) Problems are always going to occur in any business, it doesn’t matter how hard you try and avoid them. The real key to your business success is what you and your team DO when they occur. So, what do you do when a customer of yours has an issue? Click here to learn how you turn a customer into a loyalty customer with effortless customer care
4) When a customer of yours has an issue, how do you respond? Do you try to delight, or do you make the path to solving the issue as effortless as possible for your customer?
Click here to learn that your business will be more successful if you are not side-tracked by ‘delight’.
5) When it comes to growing your business, it follows that you must take your customer service seriously. Click here to learn how you handle your customers and how you treat them when something goes wrong will determine your business success.
6) In this world of instant social media notification, disloyalty for any business is a dangerous game to play. Do one thing wrong and the whole world knows about! But in the same vein – do it right and you get re-purchases and positive word of mouth – big drivers of sales revenues and profits for your business.
Click here to learn that when you get it right, 91% of customers are likely to use you again.
7) When it comes to solving an issue your customer has, click here to learn why you will create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily.
8) You and your team may have wasted much time and effort trying to exceed the expectations of your customers and delighting them with refunds, giveaways and money-off when things go wrong, but click here to learn that this isn’t the best way to ensure your customers return to you.
9) When it comes to getting customer service right in your business, is your problem-solving process effortless for your customers? Or do your customers have to work hard to get their issues resolved? Click here to stop hitting the same 4 issues when it comes to meeting your customers expectations.
10) Are you doing everything you can in your business to avoid the pitfalls of good customer service? If you step into your customers’ shoes, what do they experience when trying to resolve their late delivery, missing items or incorrect bill? Click here to learn what the 4 pitfalls are and use them to analyse your business’s own customer service performance…
11) If asked, what do you think your customers would say about your customer service? How do your customer service team treat your customers? And are you customers loyal?
Loyalty brings business success, but be careful to avoid the pitfalls along the way
Click here to learn what happens to your business success when you turn the customer service pitfalls into opportunities?
12) Bad customer service can cause disloyalty with call backs, transfers, department switching, having to repeat information and customers feeling they are being treated as another number. Click here to make your business win by avoiding the pitfalls of poor customer service.
13) If your customers believe your customer service is hard work, time consuming and stressful, or they are made to feel like a number not a person, then you and your business are in for a lot of negative word of mouth. Click here to learn that you and your business cannot afford to be complacent when it comes to the care you give your customers
14) Because customer expectations are always changing and getting more demanding, you and your business cannot afford to be complacent. Click here to start obsessing about customer loyalty in your business.
Facebook Posts
1) Customers will only stay loyal to a business if they have a good reason to. As a result, you have to work even harder to keep your customers and build their trust in you, your products and services and your team. Click here to learn how…
2) When something goes wrong for one of your customers, I am sure you and your team work very hard to put it right and ‘wow’ them with your memorable customer care. It sounds like the right thing to do, you sort the problem out and ‘delight’ them with the level of care you have provided.
But what if it’s not enough if you want to win customer loyalty? Click here to learn why delight will not win you the loyalty of your customers.
3) Problems are always going to occur in any business, it doesn’t matter how hard you try and avoid them. The real key to your business success is what you and your team DO when they occur. So, what do you do when a customer of yours has an issue? Click here to learn how you turn a customer into a loyalty customer with effortless customer care
4) When a customer of yours has an issue, how do you respond? Do you try to delight, or do you make the path to solving the issue as effortless as possible for your customer?
Click here to learn that your business will be more successful if you are not side-tracked by ‘delight’.
5) When it comes to growing your business, it follows that you must take your customer service seriously. Click here to learn how you handle your customers and how you treat them when something goes wrong will determine your business success.
6) In this world of instant social media notification, disloyalty for any business is a dangerous game to play. Do one thing wrong and the whole world knows about! But in the same vein – do it right and you get re-purchases and positive word of mouth – big drivers of sales revenues and profits for your business.
Click here to learn that when you get it right, 91% of customers are likely to use you again.
7) When it comes to solving an issue your customer has, click here to learn why you will create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily.
8) You and your team may have wasted much time and effort trying to exceed the expectations of your customers and delighting them with refunds, giveaways and money-off when things go wrong, but click here to learn that this isn’t the best way to ensure your customers return to you.
9) When it comes to getting customer service right in your business, is your problem-solving process effortless for your customers? Or do your customers have to work hard to get their issues resolved? Click here to stop hitting the same 4 issues when it comes to meeting your customers expectations.
10) Are you doing everything you can in your business to avoid the pitfalls of good customer service? If you step into your customers’ shoes, what do they experience when trying to resolve their late delivery, missing items or incorrect bill? Click here to learn what the 4 pitfalls are and use them to analyse your business’s own customer service performance…
11) If asked, what do you think your customers would say about your customer service? How do your customer service team treat your customers? And are you customers loyal?
Loyalty brings business success, but be careful to avoid the pitfalls along the way
Click here to learn what happens to your business success when you turn the customer service pitfalls into opportunities?
12) Bad customer service can cause disloyalty with call backs, transfers, department switching, having to repeat information and customers feeling they are being treated as another number. Click here to make your business win by avoiding the pitfalls of poor customer service.
13) If your customers believe your customer service is hard work, time consuming and stressful, or they are made to feel like a number not a person, then you and your business are in for a lot of negative word of mouth. Click here to learn that you and your business cannot afford to be complacent when it comes to the care you give your customers
14) Because customer expectations are always changing and getting more demanding, you and your business cannot afford to be complacent. Click here to start obsessing about customer loyalty in your business.
Blog Posts
BLOG 1 – What if you’ve had customer service wrong in your business all this time?
Your competition is stiff, the world of business is tough. In most industries it’s a buyer’s market and they can shop around and choose whoever they want to do business with and will jump ship at a moment’s notice if things don’t go right for them.
Customers will only stay loyal to a business if they have a good reason to. As a result, you have to work even harder to keep your customers and build their trust in you, your products and services and your team.
By providing the best customer service, you will increase trust, and that could mean the difference between customer loyalty and customers who jump ship.
So how do you do this?
How do you keep customers and make them loyal, make them return to you and recommend you to others?
When was the last time you looked at your customer service performance and the tools and techniques your team use?
When something goes wrong for one of your customers, I am sure you and your team work very hard to put it right and ‘wow’ them with your memorable customer care.
It sounds like the right thing to do, you sort the problem out and ‘delight’ them with the level of care you have provided.
But what if it’s not enough if you want to win customer loyalty?
What if there is a better way to deal with your customers problems…
Click here to learn what can happen to your business success when instead of ‘wowing’ or ‘delighting’ your customers, you commit to reducing their effort to getting their problem resolved.
BLOG 2 – Don’t be blinded by delight when it comes to your customer service
Problems are always going to occur in any business, it doesn’t matter how hard you try and avoid them.
The real key to your business success is what you and your team DO when they occur.
What do you do?
We all like the ‘wow’ stories about good customer service, for example:
A Lexus dealer changing the ashtray in a BMW and replacing it with the non-smoker pack without being asked, because BMW had failed to sort it out
Fed-Ex hiring a private jet to deliver a wedding dress on time, at no additional cost to the customer
How the Ritz-Carlton before returning a lost toy to his owner, created a photo album of ‘Joshie the Giraffe’ on his extended holiday, by the pool, playing golf and on the beach
These are great stories, but research shows that ‘delight’ is not going to help build loyalty after a customer has been disappointed by your product or service already.
Instead of trying to drive positive loyalty by delighting customers, you need to try and mitigate disloyalty by reducing the effort the customer has to make to get their problem resolved.
When a customer of yours has an issue, how do you respond?
Do you try to delight, or do you make the path to solving the issue as effortless as possible for your customer?
Your business will be more successful if you are not side-tracked by ‘delight’.
Crucially you need to make your customers experience of resolving their problem easy, like riding a bike downhill, no effort needed, no energy expended.
Click here to learn that when you ditch delight for effortless you are truly on the right path to customer loyalty and business success too.
BLOG 3 – The numbers don’t lie when it comes to customer loyalty
When it comes to growing your business, it follows that you must take your customer service seriously.
How you handle your customers and how you treat them when something goes wrong will determine your business success.
How many customers have you lost due to poor customer service?
Or, asked in another way - how many customers have returned (remained loyal) to you due to the way your customer service team dealt with a problem they had?
Research shows that customer loyalty delivers 3 powerful payoffs:
Increased re-purchase, increased spend and increased recommendations
All things as a business leader you spend your working life trying to achieve – right?
You know this already - word of mouth is the most powerful ally you have on your side. What your customers say to others can make or break your business.
And when you provide the best in customer service, guess what happens? Your customers will talk about you, they’ll remember you and be loyal to you.
The key to the best in customer service is to make your customers’ experience of resolving their problems effortless, like riding a bike downhill.
The numbers don’t lie, from 97,000 customer responses:
96% of customers who had to put a lot of effort into solving their own problem reported disloyalty and said they would not re-purchase
only 9% of customers who found it easy to resolve their problems reported disloyalty
‘low effort’ businesses outperform others by 31%
In this world of instant social media notification, disloyalty for any business is a dangerous game to play. Do one thing wrong and the whole world knows about!
But in the same vein – do it right and you get re-purchases and positive word of mouth – big drivers of sales revenues and profits for your business.
Remember when you get it right, 91% of customers are likely to use you again.
Click here to learn that when you work hard to be a ‘low effort’ business the rewards for your business will be big.
BLOG 4: Customer relief, the Holy Grail of your business’s customer service
When it comes to solving an issue your customer has, you will create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily.
You and your team may have wasted much time and effort trying to exceed the expectations of your customers and delighting them with refunds, giveaways and money-off when things go wrong, but this isn’t the best way to ensure your customers return to you.
In fact, research proves that when you ‘delight’ customers, they are more likely to be disloyal than
when you make problem resolution easy for them.
In his book ‘The Effortless Experience’ by Matthew Dixon and friends, the evidence points to:
“the specific things customer service does to drive disloyalty among customers are largely associated with the amount of work – effort – customers need to make to get their issue resolved”
Minimising the effort and making it easy for your customers when it comes to resolving their late delivery, missing items or incorrect bill will minimise the number of customers you lose and in turn minimise the disloyalty effect.
In fact, one commentator on the research carried out in the book says:
“What if the Holy Grail of service isn’t customer delight but customer relief
– the simple relaxing of the shoulders that comes from having your problem handled quickly and smoothly?”
Click here to discover 4 customer loyalty wins that will ensure your customers experience an effortless problem resolution when things go wrong.
BLOG 5 – Avoid these 4 pitfalls when dealing with your customers complaints
When it comes to getting customer service right in your business, is your problem-solving process effortless for your customers?
Or do your customers have to work hard to get their issues resolved?
If you step into your customers’ shoes, what do they experience when trying to resolve their late delivery, missing items or incorrect bill?
It may help to study the 4 pitfalls below and use them to analyse your business’s own customer service performance…
These are 4 things that nearly all businesses have done at one time or another and many still do!
Customers have to contact you more than once – this is because you fail to solve their issue the first time. Nothing annoys a customer more than having to call you back.
Customers having to repeat their information to you. Having to repeat the same issue to several people when they are passed to another department.
Choose your words carefully – the words you use can affect the way your customer feels – get these wrong and you customers will walk away.
Bouncing customers around from department to department wastes time and irritates all customers.
These 4 pitfalls will bring business failure, research tells us that 96% of customers who found it difficult to resolve their problem and found the process high effort did not repurchase – their loyalty was lost.
Click here to learn in more detail about the 4 pitfalls to avoid if you want to make the experience your customers have effortless when resolving their problems.
BLOG 6 – Provide a personal and purposeful customer service in your business
If asked, what do you think your customers would say about your customer service?
How do your customer service team treat your customers?
Bad customer service can cause disloyalty with call backs, transfers, department switching, having to repeat information and customers feeling they are being treated as another number.
It’s important to remember that every customer is different, they have different needs and problems and the best customer service people tailor their response depending on the needs of that customer.
The best customer service people talk to customers in a personal and purposeful way, they work out their customer’s state of mind, what kind of situation they are in and how to tailor the resolution to the needs of the customer at that exact point in time.
Do your customer service people do this?
Improving your people’s skills at framing customer service using the right language, actively offering solutions and guiding customers towards a mutually beneficial solution will bring greater customer loyalty.
And using a checklist to ensure nothing is left out and all areas of the problem are dealt with can help too.
There are many pitfalls and mistakes that are made in customer service – you’ll know and have experienced many of them yourself – on the other side – as a customer.
Click here to learn that improving your people’s skills at providing a personal and purposeful customer service to resolve your customers’ issues will mean your customers are more likely to remain loyal to your business.
BLOG 7 – Techniques to deliver the best customer service in your business
If your customers believe your customer service is hard work, time consuming and stressful, or they are made to feel like a number not a person, then you and your business are in for a lot of negative word of mouth.
Because customer expectations are always changing and getting more demanding, you and your business cannot afford to be complacent.
To succeed you need to regularly upgrade the way you deal with disappointed customers.
In this social media obsessed world that we live in, dissatisfied and angry customers can impact on your revenues and profits negatively and leave you running around trying to patch up the problem.
Instead, be proactive, stand out from your competition and focus on making your customer issue- resolution EASY for your customer, this has a measurable return on investment in the form of recommendations, repeat purchases and positive word of mouth.
Here are 4 helping hands to get you started:
Make is clear to your people what your customer service priorities are.
The focus needs to be on making it as effortless as possible for your customers to resolve their issues, don’t wow them with kindness and over-the-top solutions. Customers want practical, simple, effortless resolution.
Minimise channel switching.
You will lose customers if they have to go from your website to the phone and then when on the phone they get passed from department to department. This will be made worse if they then have to repeat their details and explain the issue every time. Let’s face it this has happened to all of us at some point and it’s infuriating.
Manage future issues at the same time.
First Contact Resolution is a worthy goal. All customers want their issue to be solved the first time they contact you, but it’s not enough. To go one better you can anticipate what the next issue is going to be and prevent it from happening, meaning the customer does not have to contact you again.
Improve your team’s skills at framing customer experience.
Customer experience engineering is more than just good soft skills. They are skills that your team need to master. They need to tailor the service interaction towards the customer, use the right language, actively offer solutions and guide them towards a mutually beneficial solution by understanding their state of mind, the situation they are in and what their needs are.
Click here to learn that when your team are using the right techniques to deliver the best customer service, they will deliver a much better outcome for your customers and also for your business.
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Your business wins when your customers experience effortless customer service
Click here to create effortless customer service
When something goes wrong for one of your customers, how hard do you and your teamwork to make the disgruntled customer a delighted customer?
But what if delighted customers are not enough...
To really secure the future of your business those customers need to be loyal customers.
In this ‘effortless customer service' edition of Business Bitesize you will learn, in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea:
- the importance of making problem resolution as easy and effortless as possible for your customers
- that the secret to keeping your customers loyal to you starts with ‘First Contact Resolution’ and ‘next issue avoidance’
- the 4 customer loyalty findings and the hidden 5th element to help you create effortless customer service
Your business will succeed when you and your team fully understand that the holy grail of customer service is an effortless (personal) experience, not customer delight.
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How do you get the biggest customerloyalty wins from your customer service?
Create business success by understanding the 4 step loyalty findings
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