A small insurance brokerage prides itself on going above and beyond. Clients get flowers on their birthdays, a handwritten card at Christmas and a free lunch invitation once a year. The owner is puzzled, then, when a long-standing client leaves for a competitor.
The client’s explanation is not what he expected. “You’re lovely people,” she says. “But every renewal means three phone calls, two forms that ask for the same information, and waiting days for an answer. The other broker just sends a link, and it’s done in ten minutes.”
Many businesses put real effort into delighting customers with extras and surprises. That instinct is generous, and small gestures do matter. But research on customer loyalty suggests that, for everyday service, what customers value most is often far simpler: not having to work hard to get what they need.
One Like insight: Customers forgive a business that’s plain. They rarely forgive one that’s hard work.
Effort beats delight
In 2010, Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman of the Corporate Executive Board, a research and advisory firm later acquired by Gartner, published an article in Harvard Business Review with a deliberately provocative title: “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers”.
Their research drew on more than 75,000 people who had contacted customer service, either by phone or through self-service channels such as websites. The headline finding was stark. Of customers who reported having to put in a lot of effort to resolve their issue, 96% were more disloyal afterwards. Among customers whose experience was low-effort, only 9% were.
The authors also found that service interactions were far more likely to leave customers disloyal than loyal. Going above and beyond made relatively little difference to loyalty, while making customers work hard did real damage. The sources of effort were often mundane: having to contact the company more than once, repeating information, being transferred between people or channels, and having to switch from the website to the phone because self-service didn’t work.
The research focused on customer service interactions, mainly contact centres, and was conducted by a firm that sells advisory services. Some critics have argued that delight still matters in other contexts, such as hospitality, and that the study’s measures of loyalty have limits. But the central idea has held up well and been widely adopted: in everyday service, reducing effort is a more reliable route to loyalty than trying to wow people.
Where customers work too hard
In most small businesses, effort hides in ordinary places. A few common culprits:
- Repeating information. A customer gives their details on a form, then again on the phone, then again in an email.
- Chasing. Having to follow up because nobody replied or confirmed what happens next.
- Being passed around. “That’s not my department, let me find someone” and starting the story again.
- Broken self-service. An online booking or payment system that fails part-way, forcing a phone call anyway.
- The second problem. Solving one issue but not the obvious next one, so the customer has to come back. The research suggested businesses should anticipate and deal with these follow-on issues in the same interaction.
None of these is dramatic. All of them are remembered.
It’s worth being clear that this doesn’t contradict the value of small, genuine gestures we explored in The Second Mint. A thoughtful touch is lovely. But it works best on top of an experience that is already easy. Flowers can’t compensate for three phone calls and two identical forms.
[Infographic placement] The effort gap. Two simple bars. High-effort experience: 96% more disloyal. Low-effort experience: 9% more disloyal. Beneath, five small icons labelled with common sources of effort: Repeating information · Chasing · Being passed around · Broken self-service · Unsolved next problem. Caption: Dixon, Freeman and Toman (2010), more than 75,000 customers.
Making it easy
Pick your three most common customer requests: booking, renewing, changing an order, asking a question, making a complaint. For each, walk through it as a customer would, counting every step, every form, every time information is repeated and every point where they have to wait or chase. Then remove whatever you can. Often the biggest gains come from small fixes: pre-filling forms with information you already hold, confirming next steps automatically, or giving one person ownership of a request from start to finish.
You can also simply ask. The research team proposed a single survey question for this: how much effort did you personally have to put in to handle your request? Asking it after key interactions, and reading the comments, quickly reveals where customers are working too hard.
A few questions can help:
- Where do customers have to give us the same information more than once?
- How often do customers have to chase us for an update?
- Does our online booking or payment work end to end, every time?
- When we fix one problem, do we also deal with the obvious next one?
Which brings us back to the insurance broker and his birthday flowers. The gesture was kind, and some clients will remember it fondly. But a simple online renewal, with details already filled in and confirmation sent the same day, would have kept the client who left. Delight is a lovely extra. Ease is what keeps people coming back.
Sources
- Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers”, Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010. The 96% and 9% figures are reported in the authors’ follow-up HBR blog post, reproduced here.
