I read an interesting article recently from the Customer Contact Council (CCC), which was featured in the July edition of the Harvard Business Review. The article investigated a number of questions around customer service and loyalty by addressing the following questions:

1. How important is customer service to loyalty?
2. Which customer service activities increase loyalty, and which don’t?
3. Can companies increase loyalty without raising their customer service operating costs?

The authors conducted a number of interviews with industry professionals and over 75,000 customers. Through their research they found 3 interesting findings:

1. Exceeding a customers expectations during your contact with them has little effect on loyalty.
2. Loyalty is more likely to be increased by reducing a customers effort in dealing with you – i.e. helping them solve their problems quickly and easily – rather than trying to impress them with lots of bells and whistles.
3. Finally, when it comes to customer service, satisfaction as a score is a weak predictor of customer loyalty.

1. Where in my organisation offers the greatest opportunity for reducing customer effort?
2. What specifically can I improve in this area that will result in time or effort saved for the customer?

Where could you be looking to save your customers effort and how could that help you improve loyalty?

Thanks to awottawa for the image