(CEB: Arlington, VA) -- The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) has challenged conventional customer-service wisdom by revealing that it doesn’t pay to delight a customer. After years of focus on the “above and beyond” service mentality, research from the Customer Contact Council, a division of CEB, indicates that most customers seek only a satisfactory solution to an issue, and that companies are artificially raising expectations in their efforts to oversatisfy them. The research also suggests, and CEB advises, that reducing the level of effort a customer exerts in the service channel is a more effective and lucrative path to customer loyalty.

In fact, 96 percent of customers who put forth high effort to resolve their issues are more disloyal—an eye-opening number when companies consider that 59 percent of customers report moderate-to-high perceived additional effort in a service interaction. The CEB’s research found that, in aggregate, customer service interactions are nearly four times more likely to lead to disloyalty than loyalty. For companies seeking to mitigate disloyalty, reducing customer effort—not delighting the customer—is the greatest lever the contact center can pull.

 …