The amount of effort a customer must exert in order to resolve an issue with your contact center plays a key role in their loyalty felt towards your company and service.  According to a study conducted and published by Matt Dixon and his colleagues, there are five drivers to customer disloyalty connected to the effort necessary to resolve an issue through your contact center operations.  If these drivers are targeted and corrected, many companies can mitigate customer disloyalty by creating interactions that are easier and require less effort.  Below you will find a list of the 5 drivers and how they play into the idea of extra customer effort leading to disloyalty.

Multiple Contacts to Resolve

First contact resolution is always a key metric that many centers analyze in order to better understand the efficiency of their contact center operations yet 62% of customers report that they have had to make more than one contact in order to resolve their issue.  If customers are forced to call your center multiple times in order to fully resolve a single issue then that creates more effort for customers who believe that your representatives should be able to resolve their issue in one call.  Beyond that, if customers have to call customer service later regarding adjacent issues related to their initial solution then this creates a perception that your company is happy to provide “break-fix” services rather than take a more proactive approach to reduce the customer’s future efforts.

Generic Service

Customers do not like to be treated as numbers or put through rigid protocols and interactions.  Representatives that sound as though they are reading from scripts and do little to tailor their interactions to quickly and effectively resolve the customer’s issue can have an incredibly negative impact on customer loyalty in regards to the additional effort required to work their way through the maze of generic responses and services.

Repeating Information

As more and more contact centers around the world adopt increasingly well-rounded software and applications that allow them to access and track customer information in one place, customers expect to have to produce and repeat their information less often.  Sadly, over 56% of customers have reported that they still have to re-explain their issue during the course of a service interaction.  If your agents must ask your customers for specific information multiple times, this added effort can lead to poor satisfaction metrics and ultimately to disloyalty and defection.

Perceived Additional Effort to Resolve

It’s said that a majority of customer effort is not actually the amount of time or energy put into dealing with your representatives but their perception of that effort.  Depending on the customer’s perception of the necessary amount of time and effort to resolve their issue, poor agent interactions or generic and redundant processes can create a very negative perception of your customer service processes.  These perceptions often times lead to a decreased feeling of loyalty to your brand as these customers see this additional effort as unnecessary and thoughtless.

Transfers

Customers no longer want to deal with long wait times, multiple agents, and the idea of explaining their issue numerous times to new representatives.  Still, 59% of customers have reported being transferred during a service interaction.  That extra time and energy required by the customer to sit through these transfers and repeat their information can only hurt customer loyalty.

As Matt Dixon’s book The Effortless Experience shows, customer disloyalty may not stem from a lack of being delighted and having their expectations exceeded through products and initial services.  Instead, the amount of time, energy and effort required to resolve issues through your customer service has been revealed to be a major factor when it comes to customer satisfaction, retention and overall loyalty.

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