Stop trying to delight your customers—that's not how you'll win more loyal customers. This is a difficult and costly strategy for the company, and worse, it fails to proportionally increase customer loyalty. This is what Gartner, in partnership with CBE, states .
We've long heard that the secret to staying competitive is investing in customer experience. Because of this, many companies invest time and money in delighting their customers, but unfortunately, this strategy has only led to increased costs and virtually no loyalty.
The key to a loyal customer lies in the effort they put into achieving their goals. Identify where your customers spend the most effort, promote improvements, and you'll have a significant impact on customer loyalty.
In this article, we'll debunk four major myths about customer loyalty that will make you rethink your strategies and help you with valuable tips that truly impact this area, so you never waste time or money again.
Myth 1: Exceeding customer expectations increases brand loyalty
The truth: Exceeding expectations or delighting customers may create “feel-good” moments, but it has no impact on loyalty or repeat business.
A delight strategy brings a 10 to 20% increase in costs (returns, discounts, promotions, etc.) and delight only happens 16% of the time.
If you simply meet your customer's expectations – consistently – you can have a significant and positive influence on their loyalty.
Reviews can be a great way to build more loyal customers and reduce your company's customer acquisition costs.
Check out: How complaints can help you build customer loyalty
Myth 2: Customer Service interactions do not affect customer loyalty
The truth: A customer is four times more likely to become disloyal after a negative customer service interaction. This is because customer service interactions often involve a significant disloyalty factor: actions that require the customer to work harder to achieve their goal.
The main factors of disloyalty:
- Repeat contacts;
- Having to change service channels;
- Repeat information;
- Robotic service (impersonal, without the “human touch”);
- Politics and bureaucratic processes;
- Other general annoyance factors (such as waiting time).
Check it out: Customer Effort Score: Measuring customer effort
Myth 3: High-effort customer service interactions are uncommon
The reality: 30% of all customers said they put in a high level of effort to resolve an issue.
There's more:
- 57% reported having to switch channels (from web to phone).
- 56% of all customers said they had to explain a problem again.
- 62% said they had to contact the company repeatedly to resolve a problem.
While adding multiple contact channels and options can be helpful for both the business and the consumer, make sure they aren't confusing the customer, requiring more effort on their part, and ultimately, unnecessarily increasing the company's costs.
Check out: 6 common mistakes that impact customer effort
Myth 4: Customer effort has little impact on business
The truth: Customers who have high-effort service experiences report being more disloyal and spending less than those who have low-effort experiences.
The customer's effort does matter!
A company's time and money are better spent creating low-effort service experiences for its customers and consistently meeting their expectations.
High-effort experiences lead to:
- 96% disloyalty;
- 4% buyback;
- 4% increase in customer spending;
- 81% negative word of mouth.
Low-effort experiences lead to:
- 9% disloyalty;
- 94% repurchase;
- 88% increase in customer spending;
- 1% negative word of mouth.
Want to learn more about customer experience? Check out What is Customer Success? Deliver Results with Loyalty
6 steps to promote a low-effort experience for your customer and increase their loyalty
Customer effort:
Customer effort has two parts: what customers should do during a service interaction and how they feel while doing it. Both are important, but a better experience comes from improving how customers feel, so focus on that first.
Customer effort is driven by:
- 36% what customers have to do.
- 64% how customers feel.
1. Identify the sources of effort
Customer Effort Score (CES) survey . If you have a low average, it means there's room for improvement in your customer experience .
Identify your customer's pain points throughout the service journey – use empathy. Put yourself in your customer's shoes and see how much effort you need to put in to achieve your goal.
Give a score for each process performed and identify what can be improved or eliminated along the way to minimize the required effort as much as possible.
2. Monitor the efficiency of service channels
- Ensure self-service channels are fully utilized so customers don't have to switch channels throughout their journey.
- Make sure you have good service integration across your channels.
- Make sure you guide customers to the best channel for each type of goal.
3. Take a proactive stance
Use practices like "next issue to be solved," going beyond resolving the first call, to avoid potential follow-up calls. By mapping out your customer's future questions or issues, you can avoid them and ensure minimal effort for your customer, resulting in a better experience.
Use your customer feedback to anticipate potential problems and identify pain points.
Check it out: 3 reasons why you should start using review management in your chain of establishments immediately
4. Act on the emotional factor to influence perception
Use emotion to reduce the perceived effort required by teaching your representatives how to manage customer interactions through psychological and behavioral practices. Making the process more enjoyable is even more important when the number of tasks the customer needs to do or the complexity of the interaction cannot be changed.
5. Value flexibility and autonomy
Ensure flexibility in processes and provide a degree of autonomy in decision-making, giving your team greater freedom to manage individual interactions. This approach streamlines processes and prevents friction in customer relationships.
6. Measure impact and expand
Becoming a low-effort organization isn't a solo process. Teams must work together to:
- Determine the impact of low-effort investments,
- Expand low-effort principles throughout the organization and
- Continually reassess to identify points of change.
The purpose of this content is not to convince you that delighting customers is wrong, but to broaden your horizons about what “delighting customers” really means and its relationship to loyalty, so you can invest time and money correctly.
Our advice is to focus on the basics first—consistently meeting your customer's expectations. Customer loyalty is directly related to how easy it is to do business with you.
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The information in this article was extracted from studies conducted by Gartner and CBE. You can find the links below:
