Customer relief, the Holy Grail of your business’s customer service?

When it comes to solving customer issues, you 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, delighting them with refunds, giveaways and money-off coupons 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 the book The Effortless Experience, by Matthew Dixon and friends, the evidence reveals:

“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?”