Back in December, I blogged for the first time about our major 2012 research initiative: keeping pace with increasing customer expectations. Over the past few months, we’ve talked with many of you and done some initial quantitative analysis on customer data to understand two things: what actually are customer expectations of service today – and – how can service organizations consistently meet these expectations in a low-cost way?
And our initial hypotheses and findings are surprising.
Are Your Customers Being Honest With You?
Now, if you directly ask your customers what they expect from customer service – you’ll get a laundry list of things that probably includes nearly everything you could potentially offer (and then some).
And, the customer will also opt for what they perceive as the ‘better’ experience. So if you ask a customer if they’d like their e-mail answered in 6 hours or twelve, they’ll choose 6.
Because, for the customer, there is no marginal cost to this additional level of service. And it’s only rational that they would want more, especially if they don’t have to pay for it.
But the question is, does the customer really need a 6 hour turnaround – or would twelve have been just fine with them? How do we separate out customer ‘nice to haves’ – things that don’t impact long-term loyalty, but are resource-intensive – from the ‘need to haves’?
And, when do we know we have crossed over a threshold where we are no longer meeting customer expectations? For example, a 48 hour turnaround may simply be too long for customers – leading them to complain and potentially churn out.
It’s clear that customers alone can’t help us separate out the ‘must haves’ from the rest. But we are starting to wonder if there are triggers or guardrails that allow companies to test out their service level or offering hypotheses and better understand customer ‘must haves’ and quickly re-calibrate if they pass any thresholds.
The Problem with Choice
One way this conflation between the ‘need to haves’ and ‘nice to haves’ plays out is in customer choice. For example, if you ask customers if they want more channels to choose from when resolving an issue, or more options on an IVR, or more tools on the website – customers will (you guessed it) always say yes.
But, a plethora of secondary research, plus some work done by our sister program, the Marketing Leadership Council, finds that too much choice is actually detrimental to the decision-making process. When consumers are presented with too many options, they easily become overwhelmed, have difficulty making decisions, and are not confident in the decision they end up making.
A customer who is overwhelmed, can’t make decisions, and spends a lot of time researching all their options – that sounds like a customer who is exerting high customer effort (the most important indicator of a customer’s service experience).
So, we are beginning to wonder if this is applicable to the service world. Is more choice—especially channel choice—in the service experience frustrating to customers? Does it lead them to make poor choices – causing them to backtrack and possibly switch channels to resolve their issue?
And is the answer what our friends at the Marketing Leadership Council suggest for marketers – choice simplicity? To provide a clear pathway to issue resolution and to guide the customer through the experience? And most importantly, how do we do that with the resources and channels we have today?
There are still a lot of questions to answer. Let us know if you want to participate in the research or answer our quick poll to help us as we go in search of answers.
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on February 22, 2012
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[...] team. Although we’ve already launched our primary research effort for the first part of 2012 (read more about that initiative here), I’m excited to let everyone know about our latest research project—focused on customer [...]