Is Your Customer Service Strategy Hurting Your Brand?

The world of customer service has experienced drastic change over the past decade. While your employees on the frontline – your customer service representatives – continue to handle hundreds of customer calls a day, they’re dealing with an array of increasingly complex issues. This is because when given the option, customers would rather handle the easy stuff themselves via self-service. They leave the more complex issues – the things they feel they can’t fix on their own – to customer service.

Many companies believe that as the issues customers need help resolving become more complex, their expectations of the service they receive also rises. However, CEB research has found that what customers really want not to be “wowed” by service, but simply to have their issue resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible. They care most about how much effort they have to spend. In fact, we found that customer effort – what they feel they have to do in order to resolve their issue – is the leading driver of customer disloyalty in their service interactions.

The reality is companies force customers to spend high-levels of effort all the time: 62% of customers report having to contact a company multiple times to resolve their issue, 59% report being transferred at least once and 56% report they have to re-explain their issue multiple times over the course of the service interaction.

We are all too familiar with the scenario of an irate customer trying desperately to get their problem resolved with a company’s customer service department, after hours and hours of being transferred, put on hold and misled. Or, as we’ve seen most recently for example, the belligerent Comcast representative (read TIME’s coverage of the incident if you missed it) who makes it nearly impossible to get your issue resolved. These are just a couple of examples of customers being forced into high-effort service interactions, but they can happen to any company.

And, in today’s digital, crowd-sourced world, just one bad experience, much like the ones mentioned above, can be quite detrimental to a company’s brand and reputation. The stakes are now higher than ever to deliver a low-effort customer experience. So, perhaps it’s time to ask, is your customer service strategy hurting your brand?

By Nick Toman & Lara Ponomareff

Is Your Customer Service Strategy Hurting Your Brand?