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The research started as a quest to discover the most effective ways to delight customers. It soon took an unexpected turn. 

Matt Dixon and his colleagues found that delighting customers didn't pay.

According to Dixon, "Those customers who are surprised, delighted, and wowed are actually no more loyal than those customers whose expectations are simply met."

They did find one thing that creates more loyalty: reducing customer effort.

Dixon co-authored a book called The Effortless Experience that details this research and shares practical ways companies can make it easier for customers to do business with them.

In our interview, Dixon shares four ways companies can reduce customer effort and improve loyalty.

Here are a few topics we discussed in our conversation:

• What is customer effort?

• Why is preventing service failures so important?

• How can companies reduce customer effort?

You can watch the full interview, or continue reading to see some of the highlights.

What is customer effort?

Dixon describes customer effort as making customers jump through hoops, and gave several common examples:

• Making a customer call multiple times to get their problem fixed. 

• Confusing or broken self-service options.

• Forcing customers to switch communication channels to get help.

• Transferring customers from one department to the next.

• Making customers repeat information, such as account numbers.

The difference between a high and low effort experience can be dramatic. For example, updating an expired credit used for automatic payments ranged from effortless to an epic hassle.

Why is it so important to prevent service failures?

"On average, most service interactions don't create loyalty at all," said Dixon. "They create disloyalty."

Think about the service stories people tell you. They are overwhelmingly negative. It's those bad experiences that stick in our memories.

Dixon explained that companies can improve loyalty just by meeting expectations. "There's a lot of good that we as companies can do by simply delivering the basics, simply delivering what the customer expects, and doing it in a consistent and predictable way."

In other words, be easy to do business with and customers will spend less time thinking about your competitors.

Four Ways to Reduce Customer Effort

One of the things I really like about The Effortless Experience is it has so many practical exercises you can use to reduce or eliminate customer effort.

Dixon highlighted four examples in our conversation.

Write self-service articles in plain language

Many self-service articles are poorly written or contain excessive industry jargon that make them difficult for customers to read and understand.

Improving these articles can quickly reduce customer effort. Dixon shared an example from the travel website, Travelocity. 

Customer service reps were getting frequent calls about issues that were easily resolved via self-service articles. Those calls decreased dramatically when the articles were re-written using clearer language.

Go to the 8:00 minute mark in the interview for the full explanation.

Customer service writing expert, Leslie O'Flahavan, suggests getting input from frontline employees to identify troublesome self-service articles. According to O'Flahavan, "Frontline support agents know what customers have already tried to understand on their own."

O'Flahavan's LinkedIn Learning course, Writing in Plain Language, has a lot of terrific tips and suggestions for improving the clarity of your writing.

Avoid the next issue

Try to help customers avoid having to contact your company multiple times.

Dixon gave an example of a wireless phone service provider that created a special $39.99 per month offer for new customers. The company got a lot of angry calls from customers who received their first bill and it was much more than $39.99.

This was explained to customers when they first signed up for service, but the bill didn't come for six weeks and many customers forgot.

A brainstorming exercise with frontline reps revealed a simple solution.

The team decided to send customers an email shortly before the first bill came out. The email clearly explained everything that went into the bill such as one-time set-up fees and required taxes. This simple email dramatically reduced the amount of calls from angry customers who were surprised by their first bill.

You can do the same exercise with your team.

Dixon suggests asking your team to imagine they had an extra 30 seconds to help each customer. What would could they do to help customers avoid future issues?

Go to the 9:13 minute mark in the interview to see Dixon's explanation.

Engineer a better experience

The way we present information to customers can make it more palatable.

Dixon gave an example of a customer trying to book a last minute flight for an important business meeting. The customer wants to use airline miles to travel on a Monday, but the flight is sold out. 

Just saying, "Sorry, that flight is sold out," could be a major disappointment.

A better strategy would be to engage the customer in what Dixon calls "purposeful small talk." This involves asking questions to better understand the customer's situation.

For example, you might discover the customer's meeting is on Tuesday. The Monday flight is sold out, but there are still seats available on Sunday and the customer has enough points to book a hotel in addition to the flight. 

Suggesting the Sunday flight as an alternative might turn an unpleasant idea (missing the meeting), into the positive experience of spending an extra day in a new city.

Go to 12:51 in the interview for more ideas on experience engineering.

Give the frontlines control

Employees must be empowered to deliver a low effort experience.

"Low effort really begins at home," says Dixon. "It starts with understanding what are the things we do today to make life difficult for our representatives."

One exercise that can help you identify this issue is to meet with your team and brainstorm a list of situations where employees frequently have to say "No" to customers.

You can use that list to identify several solutions:

• Policies that need to be changed or made more flexible.

• Resources that can help employees provide better service.

• Alternative solutions that can make the customer happy.

I've run this exercise myself, and it's both a fun and eye-opening experience that frequently reveals immediate opportunities for improvement.

Check out these employee empowerment resources to learn more, or go to the 18:08 minute mark in the interview to hear Dixon's explanation.

Additional Resources

The Effortless Experience is a highly recommended book that's full of practical advice and hands-on activities.

You can also find Dixon on LinkedIn, or check out the work he is doing at Tethr. The company provides a machine learning platform to identify customer effort in customer service calls without using a survey.