Notes on Effortless Experience By Matthew Dixon

I just finished reading ​The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi. I had enjoyed Dixon's The Challenger Sale a lot, and this one was very interesting and eye-opening as well. The big idea is that customer effort is what hurts loyalty and brand perception, and lowering the perception of effort is more impactful than trying to overly delight or exceed expectations. The book gave a lot of concrete tips on how to measure and reduce effort, and I found the language suggestions around "experience engineering" a really smart application of behavioral economics to reduce the perception of effort.

My main notes and takeaways on the book are below.

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​Intro
Myth of extraordinary customer service that delights 

1 new battleground for customer loyalty
Easier to remember bad customer service than good
A strategy of delight doesn’t pay. 
Consistently meet expectations creates loyalty
Minimal return from exceeding expectations 
Delight is expensive
Delight is rare
Basic competence matters 
Satisfaction is not an indicator of future loyalty
Not correlated
CSAT not predictive of future
Customer service interactions drive disloyalty than loyalty
Most interactions are about solving a problem
Customers hardly talk about good experiences 
We pick based on products and leave based on service 
Key is to mitigate disloyalty by removing customer effort
Worst is having to contact company more than once on same issue
First contact resolution FCR is best
Issue avoidance
Generic service is driver of disloyalty
Having to repeat info is bad
Perceived effort to resolve bad
Low effort companies outperform
Focus on getting rid of hassles
Customer effort score should be tracked 
Delighting customers too rare and expensive and not the right strategy; removing disloyalty better
Instead of exceeding expectations, focus on having them say “you made that easy”
4 principles of low effort service
Minimize channel switching. Self serve. 
Next issue avoidance (not just solving current issue)
Succeed on emotional side of issues
Incentives that value quality and not just speed or efficiency

2 why your customers don’t want to talk to you
Channel switching causss disloyalty
Phone calls due to self service that is insufficient
Era of self service first. Phone not valued as much. 
Simplify website to make self service easier
Ask if someone tried to use self service and why it didn’t work. If didn’t try, mention it’s available.
Failure reasons 
Customers couldn’t find the info they needed
Too many choices 
Paradox of choice
Customers prefer guided experience
Big Preferences vs small preferences
Customers care more about making their problem go away than the choice of channel
Customers want task-based guidance based on their intent vs company dept structure 
Customer chooses what type of issue they have then give choices of channels with a recommendation 
Issue to channel mapping tool
Remove channels like email which take more iterations to resolve than phone
Customer found the info but it was unclear
Company speak jargon
Language complexity scoring
Simplify language
Eliminate null search results. Have results in customer’s preferred terminology.
Chunk related info to make easier to scan
Avoid jargon. Good task for new hires to find since they haven’t learned all the jargon yet. 
Use active voice
Customer was simply looking for your phone number
Don’t just hide phone number
Better to incentivize self serve than block phone
Feature common links to self service tasks

3 worst question reps should ask: have I fully resolved your issue today
Customers don’t know what they don’t know
What causes customers to need to call us back
Related or spinoff issues coming up later
Systems failures, staff failures
Next issue avoidance
Think a few steps ahead
Track callbacks for any reason for some time period after a resolution
Forward resolve related issues
Brainstorm most likely call back reasons after a given issue type
Upselling, explaining how to find info on site, sending email with follow up tips
Suggest next issues and actions online in self serve also
Measure next issue avoidance
Measure something consistently
7 day window 
Compare reps to each other

4 just because there’s nothing you can do doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do
Experience engineering: carefully crafting language
Customer’s emotional perception of the interaction matters most
Actual Exertion and perceived effort different
Effort is one third do and two third feel
Not about soft skills training or being good listeners
Best reps take control and confidently guide customer
Engineering convo to improve perception of customer
Advocacy and positive language and anchoring 
Outcome to customer is the same but path to explain it very different when the convo is engineered to explain how the outcome is better than some other choice 
Actively guiding customer in way that leads to positive interpretation of mutually beneficial result
Anticipate emotional response and get ahead of it
Focus on what solutions are possible not what’s not possible
Reframing no
Use positive language
Chart of ways of saying something in 10 most frequent situations
Don’t tell them what you can’t do. Tell them what you can do. 
Rep acting on customer side
We will have availability on x date
Our normal window is in 2 weeks but let me see if I can squeeze you in tomorrow
Positioning alternatives with customer benefits
Move several steps ahead and chit chat to learn more about customer situation so you can present useful alternatives 
Don’t be so fast with the no
Focus on their interests and flexibility 
Don’t try to explain why no so much
Don’t take customer request so literally 
Ask conversational questions to chit chat and learn about possible alternatives 
Keep positive momentum going and buy time
Decision tree of questions to ask
Track customer personalities in CRM like how much they like to chit chat and run convos based on that

5 to get control you have to give control
Give autonomy to service reps
Being curious
Creative
Critical thinking
Experimental
Advanced problem solving and IQ
Resilient, able to deal with high pressure, able to concentrate on tasks, able to take coaching, control quotient CQ
Qtip: quit taking it personally
CQ varies the most by company environment 
Trust in rep judgment
Allowing reps to go off playbook for certain situations
Eliminate checklist scoring mentality for QA
Different mastery levels of reps across skills
Remove pressure of time or average handling time AHD. Better average talk percentage ATP metric of talking to customers vs all other work 
Rep understanding of alignment with overall company goals
Connection to bigger mission
Committee to turn corporate goals into department ones
Peer support network among reps
Need adequate time
True best practice sharing
Receptive reps
Rep discussion forums
Moderated by single frontline rep
Ask customers about perceived effort

6 disloyalty score: measuring customer effort
Customer effort score (CES)
CSAT not as predictive of loyalty
NPS too high level and masks support issues
Transactional loyalty important to track
Post transaction survey
“The company made it easy for me to handle my issue” and 1 to 7 scale of how much agree with statement
Effort important if low product stickiness or low switching costs
Customer effort assessment (CEA)
Dive deep into sources of effort across channels

7 making low effort stick
Have compelling change story of why change necessary 
Explain current approach and why it no longer works, data backed explanation of what needs to change, and plan for how org will support the transition 
Sample story and script
Training and coaching both important 
Train beginning to end for a few most common issues
Example training exercises in book
Ask reps about personal experiences with other vendors that were high or low effort
Network judgment and learning from network

8 effort beyond the customer contact center
Eliminate lines
Schedule technical support ahead of time 
Floating cashiers with phones