Reduce Customer Effort to Build True Loyalty with Rick DeLisi

Welcome to Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley. Author, speaker, and educator on neural marketing and the psychology of persuasion. Every week we talk with thought leaders that will help you improve your influence with factual evidence and concrete research. Introducing your host, Roger Dooley.

Roger Dooley:     Welcome to the Brainfluence Podcast. I’m Roger Dooley. Our guest today is Rick DeLisi of the Gartner Group. Rick works with Gartner clients in a range of communications and customer experience topics, but there’s one in particular that we’re going to focus on today, customer effort. Rick is the coauthor of The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty. Welcome to the show, Rick.

Rick DeLisi:         Hey Roger. Thanks very much.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. Rick, looking at your LinkedIn bio, there was a line that kind of cracked me up. You joined CEB, which later became part of Gartner a dozen years ago, and before that you were Director of Corporate Communications at Independence Air, which you call the most successful unsuccessful airline in history. What’s the story there?

Rick DeLisi:         Our company was originally part of the United network. We were the United Express carrier on the east coast, and at the time that United went into bankruptcy in 2004, the whole arrangement between our company and United changed, and so we decided to, instead of knuckling under to their demands that they made during their bankruptcy, we decided to compete against them, which was very exciting and ultimately not the least bit profitable, but the company was very successful in terms of customer service. We were named the number one airline for domestic customer satisfaction, ironically, a month after we’d gone out of business. So it was a great product that people really loved, but the timing was terrible. Our emergence as an independent carrier happened exactly at the same time that oil prices spiked and we just could not ever make a profit, but it was a heck of a ride.

Roger Dooley:     That probably says something about the competition, that you were ranked number one after you went out of business, so what do you make of the airline industry today, Rick?

Rick DeLisi:         Now that there’s been so much consolidation, both of carriers and of capacity, it seems to have righted itself, and it seems like the remaining airlines are all doing pretty well. I don’t know about you, for all the travels I do, I’m never on a plane that isn’t fully crowded, and the number of seats and number of departures between destinations has been cut back, so they’ve sort of right sized the capacity to match the demand, and it seems to have worked economically.

Roger Dooley:     Well, I think the economics seem to be favoring the carriers, but I’m not so sure about the customer experience. It seems like that is not necessarily going anywhere fast, and the airline industry seems to be the one industry that keeps trying to make the standard product worse, you know? I mean, in other businesses, they’ll sort of migrate the stuff downwards, so what used to be a feature on a premium model is now the standard, but the airlines seem to be going in the opposite direction, and even now they’re cramming more seats on planes and making bathrooms smaller.

Rick DeLisi:         It always used to feel like the story of a flight that was cancelled or some horrible customer service experience was always the kind of thing that you’d tell other people after a trip was over. Now the exceptional story is, “Hey, listen, I once had a great experience on an airline,” so that is now worthy of retelling because it happens so infrequently.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. It’s unfortunate, but I guess that’s the state of the industry, and nobody feels it’s in their product’s or their brand’s best interests to sort of step out from the pack and say, “Okay, we’re not going to try delivering the cheapest. We’re just going to deliver a consistently good experience for all levels of customers,” but oh well, we’ll see. Maybe it’ll happen someday.

Rick, The Effortless Experience book came out about five years ago. Weirdly, though, I keep running into customer experiences that are anything but effortless. This might be a really open ended question, but why do companies keep making customers jump through hoops when they know that, or should know that reducing effort is a path to loyalty? Do they actually know that, do you think, or do some people know it but the C-level executives don’t buy into it? What do you think?

Rick DeLisi:         I think the vast majority of companies understand it at some intuitive level, but their everyday practices and policies, and just force of habit end up being entirely company-centric. You know, we ask companies around the world, “Do you think your company is customer-centric?” Something like 100.0% of hands go up, but then we ask, “If you think you’re being customer-centric because you spend a lot of time thinking about your customers, invariably you’re just becoming deeper and deeper entrenched into a company-centric mentality,” because instead of thinking about your customers, what companies really need to do is think like their customers.

Customers have no idea what pressure companies are under. Customers have no idea what kind of policies, or legalities, or restrictions, or any kind of requirements, the rules and regulations of heavily regulated industries. Customers know none of those things and don’t care. But it’s very hard for companies to think like their customers. It’s a hard thing to do. You’ve got to be willing to take your own brain at of your head and put the customer’s brain in your head, and the deeper and deeper you get into whatever your company is trying to accomplish, the farther and farther away it seems from truly understanding and thinking like customers.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. You know, I think just observing customers would be a good start. I don’t think enough companies do that or spend enough time doing that. If they could just watch a representative sample of customers using their website or interacting with their voice menus, they would see that, “Wow, this really isn’t that good of an experience. People are having to click all around the website to find what they’re looking for.” There are actually both technical tools that could measure that sort of thing as well as just the ability to observe individual customers. But I just don’t think it happens, because I know that constantly I’m dealing with these things that you would have to imagine any customer experience expert or even somebody who’s reasonably knowledgeable would take a look at what was happening and say, “Wow, that isn’t what we expected. We didn’t know people were doing that.” But the stuff doesn’t get fixed either, so clearly nobody’s watching or they don’t care.

Rick DeLisi:         Well, if you think about it, the customer experience at any one of us, as with any company, is the product of hundreds or maybe even thousands of decisions made by that company and given a choice between making a decision in favor of the company or the customer, invariably the scale tips in the direction of the company. Companies don’t intentionally create a poor experience, but very often that poor experience is the product of a lot of decisions that were designed to favor the company.

Roger Dooley:     Well, I’m sure you’re right. And you know, I think often it’s a decision that sort of comes down, “Well, yeah, this would be good for the customer, but it’s a legal thing. It’s a security thing. It’s a something thing, and so we really have to do it our way.” You know, something else that I think you make a point frequently and early in the book is that exceeding customer expectations is kind of overrated as a strategy. I still run into people on the speaking circuit who talk about customer delight and surprising your customer, and really astonishing them with cool stuff, and there’s nothing wrong with doing that occasionally, I’m sure, but you take issue with it as an overall business strategy. What does the research show about that?

Rick DeLisi:         Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s so important to think about what we’re discussing here is about the strategy. Before we wrote The Effortless Experience book, we did a piece that got a lot of play in Harvard Business Review that was called Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers. It’s based on a premise that a lot of companies have always believed when a customer has some kind of a problem or an issue or something that needs to be resolved, the company’s job is to somehow exceed expectations, create a wow moment, go above and beyond, do something magical or memorable to win that customer’s loyalty. And our initial discovery was that customers don’t really care about those kinds of things at the moment that they have a problem or an issue. What they care about is, “Make the problem go away as fast and easily as possible.”

Now, in the year since that piece came out in HBR, a lot of people have quoted us as saying, “You’re the guys who told companies to stop delighting their customers.” So the clarification there is, we never said that. What we said is, if your strategy is to delight customers who are having a problem on a universal basis, that’s doomed to fail, because according to our research, customer expectations in a customer service interaction are exceeded only about 16% of the time. So as an overall strategy, it just doesn’t make sense because it’s not achievable. Of course, if a customer’s delighted by any part of the experience, there’s nothing wrong with that. We never said that was a bad idea, just that it’s a bad strategy and that the winning strategy is, and again, particularly for customers who have some kind of a problem or an issue that requires them to contact the company, make the problem go away as fast and easily as possible, and you will ensure that customer’s future loyalty.

Roger Dooley:     Well, I think that delight can be kind of hard to scale, or at least scale at all economically. The classic example that you still see trotted out occasionally is the Joshy story, the little stuffed giraffe that was left at, I think, a Ritz Carlton someplace, and they not only returned the stuffed animal, they created a whole little album of his pictures, lounging by the pool with other stuffed animals, and a security badge with his picture on it, and all these cool things. And I mean, that is really great, and I’m sure that that family found it very memorable, and it turned into a social media sensation as well, so they got plenty of free advertising out of it. It’s a great example, but you can’t reproduce that constantly, because first of all, you’re never going to get the social media attention again, and secondly, you just can’t have multiple departments spending hours on a project for one customer who might be a single-time customer.

Rick DeLisi:         Well, that’s the thing, is that these delight stories are fun to tell, and they’re memorable because they’re exceptional. Nobody tells a story about a routine interaction that came and went and really escaped notice. I mean, stories are stories because they’re unique and unusual. You know, one of the favorite stories in the customer service world is about Zappos, and according to legend, a phone conversation with one customer that lasted nine hours. But that’s nothing like the normal. No company could succeed having lengthy conversations with every single customer every single time, nor does every customer want that. Those stories are fun to tell, and somehow or other it’s been perceived as if that ought to be the expectation or the aspiration. “Let’s try to achieve that kind of thing all the time,” which is not only impossible, but it’s unnecessary.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. I’ve heard that example thrown out too. And to me, that sounds like the most horrible customer experience ever. I mean, unless you’re trying to talk to that person off a ledge or something, the idea that a customer service person would take up that amount of time is just a nightmare for me, you know? It’s kind of funny because Zappos is a great example, and they deliver delight in other ways by, in the early days at least, they would surprise people with next-day shipping and other little benefits like that.

So they were definitely delight-oriented, but their parent company, Amazon, really never delights me. You know, they just execute. I click a button, I forget about it, and the stuff shows up when it’s supposed to. It never shows up a day early. There’s never a bonus product in there. They never send me flowers or a nice bottle of single malt because I’m a great customer. They just get it done time after time. I never have to hunt down an order because it went astray. Now, of course something probably will now that I’ve said that, but you know, it’s a nearly flawless but sort of unexceptional customer service experience, and that has made me more loyal to Amazon, I think, than any other company, just because of that. I think, “Why would I shop someplace else where I can order it and, you know, “Is it going to get here on Tuesday, or a week from Tuesday?” It’s just not worth it.

Rick DeLisi:         Again, remember the big asterisk on our whole research is that it’s based on what happens when there is a problem. So if you want to describe hundreds of nominal or perfectly acceptable customer service experiences you’ve had with Amazon, and by the way, I have too, none of that is what we’re even talking about. We’re only discussing what happens at the moment that there is a problem or there is an issue, something that the company needs to resolve. Then what happens?

Roger Dooley:     Right. And I think there’s probably two elements to that. The ideal situation is that the customer doesn’t have to resolve problems, which has been mostly my case with Amazon, but then when it does happen that it’s dealt with very efficiently. Rick, the data in the book suggests that the average company doesn’t do all that good or effective of a job when the customer does have a problem. What are some of the common things that go wrong when the customer says, “Okay, I got the wrong thing,” or, “The thing is not working the way I expected it to. I need help,” and contacts the company. What are the most common things that go wrong?

Rick DeLisi:         Well, there’s a couple of things. The most common thing that goes wrong that sure doesn’t feel like it’s going wrong in the moment is when the company bends over backwards to apologize to the customer. One of the things that we’ve been learning is that apologies don’t do very much, and in fact in some ways they can hurt, because an apology is moving the focus in the interaction back to the problem itself. When customers have a problem or an issue, what we’ve discovered is they just want the problem to go away, so your apology doesn’t help the problem go away. When companies focus on fast, easy, effortless resolution of the problem, that customer’s future loyalty is virtually guaranteed, so apologizing or doing anything that focuses on the problem instead of focusing on the solution, that already is moving backward.

But the other thing that companies do is they just create too many steps and hoops and hurdles, too many things that customers have to do, as if the onus for resolving the problem is on the customer’s side. Things like having to go through many menus in the phone tree before you can talk to a live rep, or being asked a million questions upfront to validate your account before you’ve even discussed the nature of the problem, or how hard is it to even find the company’s phone number or an email address or a way to contact the company on the website? How many clicks deep into the website is the phone number or the contact information?

You know, when a customer has a problem or an issue, they’re already somewhat upset. Maybe even more emotional, our evidence shows, in today’s world than you might have seen 10 years ago, and so already you’re starting from a negative mindset, and when companies do things that don’t immediately feel to the customer like, “I’m here to solve your problem,” anything that doesn’t feel like that is moving the progress of the real resolution backward. When a customer has a problem or an issue, they don’t want to answer a million questions. They just want somebody to step up and own the problem, and the vast majority of frontline people working for big companies all around the world just simply aren’t encouraged to own the customer’s problem. Very often it feels like you’re just speaking to some mechanical representative who’s speaking off a script that was probably written by a lawyer, and it just doesn’t feel like the person you’re talking to really cares about you or getting rid of your problem.

Roger Dooley:     Is there a right way to use voice menus? Because I can see where in some situations, a person might prefer a voice menu. It’s sort of like the self-checkout at the supermarket. If I’ve got a jar of pickles and that’s it, every time I’ll head for the self-checkout because I can scan it and be on my way in 30 seconds. I don’t need the human interaction. But if I’ve got a whole basket full of stuff and I’ve got some sale prices that I’m not sure about and whatnot, then I need to go the human route. But voice menus always seem to start off with some really basic assumptions. They give you some language choices, and then it’s they tell you to, “Pay careful attention and listen to everything, because we recently changed the menu,” which some have said that for years, so either they’re constantly changing the menu or it’s just a ruse to get you to listen to everything so you don’t start yelling “representative” right away. But have you seen some effective use of voice menus?

Rick DeLisi:         You know, I’ll answer that question, but it’s going to be the same answer for virtually everything. That is, everything that you as a company do in front of your customers has to feel to customers like it’s being done in their favor or for their benefit. And even though a lot of companies say, “In order to route you to the most effective department, or the most applicable person to answer your question, here’s seven options,” that just never comes across to customers like it’s in their favor or their benefit. Even something as simple on an IVR menu, as, “We want to make sure to resolve your issue as quickly as possible, and the best way to do that is to make sure you’re talking to the right person, so help us figure that out so that we can get this problem solved right away.”

I’ll share with you later some followup discoveries we made after our initial discovery about the whole idea of measuring customer effort as an outcome after an interaction. But what we’ve discovered is that the way the whole experience feels to customers is way more important than most companies would have ever imagined. So whatever you do as a company, don’t be thinking about what you want. Don’t be thinking about what you’re trying to accomplish. Think of it like the customer and immediately reassure the person that you’ve developed the fastest and easiest way to solve their problem, and then at least you’re off to a decent start.

Roger Dooley:     Right. Rick, I think you’ve hit on a point there and that’s kind of interesting. I want you to talk a little bit about how you can measure customer effort, but what you’re also saying is that it’s the perception of the effort that can be as important as more quantitative metrics. It’s kind of like when the doctor asks somebody, “What’s your pain level from one to nine?” You know, nobody really knows exactly what that scale means, but if the person says “nine,” well, they’re probably really hurting. And if it’s a lower number, well, it can’t be too bad, but the same condition might produce very different numbers for different people, so explain a little bit about that.

Rick DeLisi:         Yeah. Let me start by sharing with you what we first learned and then what we learned in subsequent research, because the initial discovery, that’s the sort of central nervous system of the book. The primary discovery of the book was based on simply a research project that we did asking, “What question could you ask customers immediately after some sort of a customer service interaction, particularly a problem resolution interaction? What question could you ask that would best predict that customer’s future loyalty?” And because companies are always asking questions of their customers and ultimately the consideration for the company is, “Are we going to keep this customer, are they gonna continue to be a customer, or are we going to lose them? And if we knew, what could we do about that?” So over the many years, the standard question in the industry is what we call CSAT, customer satisfaction overall. “How satisfied were you with this experience?”

And what we learned in the research is, while of course every company wants customers to be satisfied, customers’ answer to the satisfaction question, as it turns out, just isn’t very predictive of their future loyalty. For example, a lot of customers say, “Yeah, I was satisfied with that interaction,” and then they end up becoming disloyal later anyway. Conversely, plenty of customers say, “I was not satisfied with that interaction,” but then they remain customers anyway. The point is, a customer’s answer to the satisfaction question just isn’t a very good predictor of their future behavior. So we wondered, “Well, what would be a better question?”

Now, Fred Reichheld, who’s written a couple of books about the ultimate question, which is the the root source of NPS, net promoter score, discovered that a better question to ask is, “How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or a colleague?” And the NPS question is more predictive of a customer’s future loyalty, but what we learned is that there’s an even better question you can ask again right after an issue or problem has been resolved by the company. And that question is, “How much effort was required for your issue to be resolved?” And what we’ve learned is that the way a customer answers that effort question is a nearly perfect predictor of their future loyalty.

That was the initial discovery. Simply a wording consideration. “What one question could I ask that would best predict what a customer is going to do in the future?” And at that time, we and the companies that were part of that initial study all just kind of surmised that effort is kind of like exertion. Effort is based on what you have to do. So what do customers have to do? How many things do they have to do to get their issue resolved? How hard or complex are those things they have to do? And then ultimately, how long does it take to do those things?

We assumed that effort in the mind of customers was based on what they have to do, but in our subsequent research we discovered that the do side of effort really only covers about one-third of how customers answer the effort question. 34.6% to be exact, and the other two-thirds is based entirely on how the whole experience felt. The feel side of effort, seemingly intangible, seemingly emotional, even in some ways seemingly irrational, has far more bearing on how a customer will answer the effort question, and then ultimately what will predict their future loyalty.

So as we began to explore that a little bit more, we realized there’s a whole field of art and science that can be applied to helping a customer feel like an experience was less effort, and the vast majority of all of that is based on attitude, and word choice, and the way customers are handled. Things that are relatively easy for companies to do that not only don’t cost more, but in many cases cost less. That’s when we coined the term “experience engineering,” and that’s what the smartest and best companies do with their customers. They engineer the experience to feel like less effort, even in situations where what a customer has to do, and how many things they have to do, and how long it takes to do those things can’t be changed.

Roger Dooley:     Right. Rick, what would an example or two be of those kinds of changes that our listeners could make in the way they treat their customers?

Rick DeLisi:         Well, here’s the simplest one. Here’s something that I think universally all of us hate as customers. Forget about your responsibilities for whatever company you’re working for, but just as a customer, how often have you called some company and the first thing the IVR, the voice menu says is, “Please put in your 16 digit account number.” So you put in your digits and then you wait to finally talk to a live rep, and that live rep comes on, and what’s the first question they always ask you? “What’s your account number?” It’s like, “I just put it in the system. Why are you asking me that again?” What if that same rep came on the line and said, “Hey, Roger. I know you just put your number in the system, but just for security, would you mind repeating it?” The do is exactly the same, and it feels completely different to customers, and there’s dozens of opportunities in any interaction to create an experience that feels like less effort.

That’s the simplest example. Now, let me share a slightly more complex example. Let’s say the issue that you’re presenting to the customer service rep is a complex one, and it’s gonna require multiple steps, and it’s going to take some time to resolve, and there’s nothing you could do to change that. Well, if the customer service rep says, “Hey, Roger. Here’s the thing, I know this seems like a pretty complex problem to you. We’ve helped hundreds of other customers solve this problem, and what we’ve discovered is the fastest and easiest way to get this problem resolved, so that’s what I’d like to do with you right now.” Then you could do whatever it was you were going to do anyway, and yet it feels like remarkably less effort to the customer. Just reassuring the customer that the number one goal you have is to own their problem and solve it in as fast and as easy a way as possible. It just changes the emotional dynamic of the interaction in a way that ends up being very positive for both the customer and the company, so a lot of it is just words and attitude, and we have lots of examples in the book of some of the art and science of experience engineering.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. You sort of touched on this, Rick. One area of customer effort that tends to drive me up the wall is security, because obviously today security is a big issue. You know, every week there’s some new hack where you’re getting a notification from some company that you trusted that their information got compromised, or your information did. And it seems like some companies, though, just sort of get it wrong. Amazon keeps me logged in all the time, ready to buy constantly. I’ve got the same cheesy password I set up a dozen years ago, but just the other day I registered at the Harvard Business Review, which you mentioned, because I wanted to get six, read six articles instead of three for free. And first of all, it did not tell me what I needed for passwords, so I entered a password and then it immediately produced this big error message saying, No, it’s got to have an uppercase, a lowercase, a number, a symbol, but only these symbols,” and so on.

You know, their password for reading a few extra articles was much tougher than my bank or financial institutions. To me, this is a case sort of of a security expert run amok, where the customer experience people have been shoved into the background, and a security person is saying, “This is the way you got to do it, and we’re going to expire that password in six months too.” I visualize maybe a nontechnical executive with a customer experience person on one hand saying, “You know, this isn’t really the best way to do it. Our competitors don’t do this. It’s really not necessary for the type of product or service that we’re offering here.” And then a security person on the other hand who can produce all kinds of techno speak and statistics that, “Hey, we got to be as secure as possible.” How should a company try and split the difference on how to come up with something that works for the customers but doesn’t add to the woes of the business?

Rick DeLisi:         Yeah. All you have to do is, with any decision, ask yourself this question. “Is there a way that we can, in good conscience, portray whatever it is we’re going to decide so that it feels like we’re on the customer side? Is there something we could do or something we can say that explains that what we’re doing is for your benefit?” You’re right. There’s nothing more frustrating than the fact that the password protocols for virtually every website you use are different in some way. Can’t that be explained upfront? Can’t that be explained upfront as a benefit to you? Can’t that be explained in a way that feels like the company is on your side instead of just trying to protect itself?

When it comes to IT security, and really when it comes to legal protection for companies, the people who are in charge of those two disciplines probably secretly in the back of their mind would wish that no customer would ever do anything, because every time any customer does anything, there’s the potential of some kind of problem or liability. You can’t blame the IT security and general counsels of the world for trying to protect their companies, but there’s gotta be some way to explain it so that it at least plausibly feels like it’s in the customer’s benefit.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, I think that’s an excellent comparison, because I know if you talk to a CEO, they would never just send their corporate counsel to negotiate a deal, because that attorney would do the best job possible of protecting the company, and probably the deal wouldn’t happen. At some point, whoever the CEO or whoever the deciding executive is has to sort of step in and say, “Okay, we’ll protect ourselves on these risks, on this other risk we will not, because that’s going to create a burden for the other party that they’re not going to go for.” They can make them a somewhat informed decision, but I think when you get to technology, it’s more difficult because they can’t really use their business experience to judge what technical risk something represents.

Rick DeLisi:         If you wrapped yourself in three levels of bubble wrap and laid on a water bed in a dark room, you’d never get injured either, but that’s just no way to live.

Roger Dooley:     Well, yeah. I worked with a guy once who had been a controller at sort of a medium sized company that had its own airplane. He said the worst thing he had to do was listen to the company pilot when the pilot needed to buy new equipment, wanted to buy some new radar gizmo. And the pilot come and say, “Okay, this is going to be $25,000,” and say, “Gee, do we really need this?” And the pilot just, “Well, yeah. This is for safety.”

Rick DeLisi:         Right.

Roger Dooley:     It’s like, “Okay, well I don’t want to be the one blamed when the plane crashes, so if the pilot needs it, the pilot gets it.” And I think that same kind of thing happens with security teams at times, where you knowthey have the company’s best interest at heart but aren’t always looking at the customer experience side.

Rick DeLisi:         That’s what made a difference in the airline business too, is that every airline company wants to not only say but believe that, “Safety is our number one priority.” But in a lot of conversations within a company, the safety card is the way to win your argument, and it’s pretty hard to come back against anybody who says, “No, this decision is based entirely on safety.” Well, it’s hard to see your way around that without coming across as somebody who doesn’t care about people, so finding that right balance is critically important, and it’s always a matter of balancing the needs of the customer against the needs of the company, but every decision a company makes has to at least feel like the customer’s interests were considered. And as we’ve all experienced, there’s way too many companies, so when you’re interacting with them, just the general attitude of people and even language makes it feel like, “You, as the customer, are the problem and we kind of wish you’d just go away.”

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. Rick, let me ask you one last question here. A lot of our listeners are marketers. What comments might you have about customer effort in marketing?

Rick DeLisi:         Sure. Well, really the book, The Effortless Experience, the subtitle is “Winning in the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty.” So while customer service and customer effort are often thought of as the topics of our book, it’s really about loyalty and that of course is something every marketer cares deeply about. What we’ve learned is that there’s really two kinds of customers. Customers who aren’t having some kind of a problem or an issue right now, and those who are, and we know that any customer who has any kind of problem that requires them to reach back out to the company, those people are the greatest loyalty risk, so marketers should be deeply concerned about the company doing anything they can to keep their customers loyal.

Sometimes we’ll ask in group settings, “What percentage of your customers are loyal right now?” And it’s really just kind of a conversational trick question here. Because the answer is 100%. 100% of all your customers are loyal right now, because loyalty isn’t a thing you do right now. Loyalty is a thing you do tomorrow, and a week from now, and a year from now. So the question is, “Are the people who are our customers today going to continue to be our customers tomorrow?” And by focusing specifically on those people who are at the highest loyalty risk, which are customers who were having some kind of a problem or an issue, understanding that the way to ensure that today’s customer is going to remain loyal tomorrow is to create a low effort resolution experience whenever there’s a problem or an issue. While that might be executed ultimately by the customer service department of a company, everyone in marketing should be deeply concerned about whether or not all the hard work required to attract a new customer in the first place doesn’t get flushed away by one bad service experience.

Roger Dooley:     Great advice. Let me remind our listeners that we’re speaking with Rick DeLisi of the Gartner Group, coauthor of The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty. Rick, where can people find you and your ideas online?

Rick DeLisi:         Yeah. The easiest way is just to go to our book website, which is effortless-experience.com. Lot more case studies, stories, profiles of those of us who’ve been involved in the project and a lot more information that is fun and sharable and will help you recognize right away that creating a lower effort experience for your customers is very doable. It doesn’t cost any money. It makes intuitive sense to people who’ve never really heard about the idea before, and ultimately it’s what we call a win-win-win-win, because it’s absolutely best for your customers, it certainly is best for the profitability and success of the company. It’s best for the frontline people who have to deal with customers every day, and it’s best for you as a service or a marketing leader. It’s the kind of thing where everyone emerges a winner once you figure out how to create a lower effort experience.

Roger Dooley:     Great. Well, we will link there, to the book, and to any other resources we mentioned on the show notes page at rogerdooley.com/podcast and we’ll have a text version of our conversation there too. Rick, thanks for being on the show.

Rick DeLisi:         Thanks so much for inviting us, and here’s to an effortless life for all of us.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of The Brainfluence Podcast. To continue the discussion and to find your own path to brainy success, please visit us at RogerDooley.com.