The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, Rick DeLisi

Everyone knows that the best way to create customer loyalty is with service so good, so over the top, that it surprises and delights. But what if everyone is wrong? 

In their acclaimed bestseller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted many longstanding myths about sales. Now they’ve turned their research and analysis to a new vital business subject—customer loyalty—with a new book that turns the conventional wisdom on its head. 

The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it. They devote untold time, energy, and resources to trying to dazzle people and inspire their undying loyalty. Yet CEB’s careful research over five years and tens of thousands of respondents proves that the “dazzle factor” is wildly overrated—it simply doesn’t predict repeat sales, share of wallet, or positive wordof-mouth. The   Loyalty is driven by how well a company delivers on its basic promises and solves day-to-day problems, not on how spectacular its service experience might be. Most customers don’t want to be “wowed”; they want an effortless experience. And they are far more likely to punish you for bad service than to reward you for good service.

If you put on your customer hat rather than your manager or marketer hat, this makes a lot of sense. What do you really want from your cable company, a free month of HBO when it screws up or a fast, painless restoration of your connection? What about your bank—do you want free cookies and a cheerful smile, even a personal relationship with your teller? Or just a quick in-and-out transaction and an easy way to get a refund when it accidentally overcharges on fees?

The Effortless Experience takes readers on a fascinating journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes customers loyal—and disloyal. The authors lay out the four key pillars of a low-effort customer experience, along the way delivering robust data, shocking insights and profiles of companies that are already using the principles revealed by CEB’s research, with great results. And they include many tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, decrease customer churn, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the “dazzle factor” fails to deliver.  The rewards are there for the taking, and the pathway to achieving them is now clearly marked.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Professional Development, Management, Leadership, Buisness, Audiobook

327 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 12, 2013

Reviews

[Cindy (BKind2Books) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid advice on customer service, but by the end I found myself kind of oversold. The basic premise - that customer service these days is about making it easy vs making it 'delightful' - is good and the author backs it with solid examples and studies. But I think that the book focused more on the customer 'call center' model and less on face-to-face / customer service driven areas. He does not make this applicable to the restaurant / corner pharmacy / grocery store and that's where much of this is sorely needed. Still there were a few good take-aways, even if it wasn't easy to dig them out. Perhaps the author needed to take a little of his own advice.

[Adam Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the more solid business books I've read this year. The data-based conclusions are really eye-opening. I believe this is will be considered one of the best business books on customer service and customer engagement to be written in the past 5-10 years. If you don't read this, you will have a big gap in your understanding of customer service and the reality of customer loyalty.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is Gold For anyone working in Service, Customer Experience, Experience Design, or people who actually want to build a healthy customer base.

The focus here is on contact centre, but is essential reading for anyone who cares about profitable long term end-to-end experiences for customers.

New ways of measuring success, nurturing teams, and thinking about service from the customer’s experience are all refreshing.

The data shows that for many businesses this is an area worth investing in, beyond automation and efficiency but towards advocacy, focussing on outcomes and the power of language.

[Dmitry · Rating 2 out of 5]

(The English review is placed beneath the Russian one)

Эта книга является тем редким исключением, когда читая её во второй раз, я пересмотрел к ней своё отношение. Можно сказать, что причиной этому стала откровенная реклама собственных услуг авторов. Другими словами, эта книга является хорошо закамуфлированной рекламой консалтинговых услуг авторов этой книги. Возможно, тем, кому книга очень понравилась, это либо не заметят, либо не придадут серьёзного значения (этому). Но с моей точки зрения, авторам следовало не так сильно выпячивать свои консалтинговые услуги.

Причину, почему книга мне понравилась в первый раз можно найти в первой половине книги. Вообще, первая половина книги довольно существенно отличается от второй, хотя вторая как бы подразумевает, что она больше ориентирована на практику. Проблема только в том, что вся практика сужается до обслуживания клиентов call-центром. Да, вы всё правильно поняли – в первой половине книги речь идёт об услугах, которые компании оказывают своим клиентам, т.е. речь идёт не о call-центрах, а обо всех компаниях как таковых. Поэтому первая половина книги может быть интересна и актуальна всем компаниям, которых беспокоит вопрос качественного клиентского обслуживания. И вот тут я полностью согласен с авторами книги, что необходимо сделать всё возможное чтобы минимизировать временные и иные затраты клиента при обращении к услугам компании. К примеру, если клиент заходит на интернет-сайт вашей компании, чтобы заказать на нём некий товар, эта операция должна быть максимально простой, понятной и короткой. Чем больше шагов необходимо предпринять клиенту, тем менее удовлетворённым будет клиентский опыт. В связи с этим мне вспомнилась замечательная и очень известная книга (на эту же тему) под названием «Не заставляйте меня думать» (Don't Make Me Think! A common sense approach to web usability). Обе книги содержат одну и ту же идею. Спорить тут, разумеется, не с чем. Но если всё так очевидно (а это действительно самоочевидно для любого маркетолога), то в чём проблема? Проблема в том, что это требует не только усилий по продумыванию того как максимально упростить взаимодействие клиента с фирмой, так чтобы по ходу дела ничего не сломалось. Это, во-первых, а во-вторых, это зачастую ведёт к издержкам, а издержки руководители компаний очень не любят. Так что всё упирается в эти две проблемы. Однако это уже тема второй половины книги.

Во второй половине авторы решили предложить не только теоретические воззрения, но и как это может/должно выглядеть на практике. С этой целью они сосредоточились исключительно на работе call-центра. И вот тут у меня начали появляться сомнения в эффективности предлагаемого метода и большие вопросы к авторам. Я допускаю, что многим читателям предлагаемые авторами идеи покажутся довольно интересными и перспективными. Возможно. Но для меня они оказались недостаточно убедительными – в лучшем случаи и минипулятивными и нечестными – в худшем. Я приведу один пример из книги. Авторы описывают гипотетических разговор сотрудника call-центра с клиентом и предлагаются два вариант, где второй является более эффективным и правильным, с точки зрения бизнеса.

Вариант А: «Мы сможем выслать вам специалиста завтра, но мы не можем назвать конкретное время, так что кому-то придётся быть дома с 8:00 до 20:00, чтобы его встретить. Вас это устроит?».

Вариант Б: «Похоже, что специалист, который сможет подъехать к вам с точностью в два часа, освободится только на следующей неделе. Но, кажется, я могла бы прислать к вам специалиста завтра. Он не может сказать, в какое конкретное время приедет, поэтому необходимо, чтобы кто-то был дома с 8 утра до 20 вечера. Во всяком случае, всё будет сделано уже завтра, а не на следующей неделе. Понимаю, это не совсем удобно, решите, подойдёт ли это вам?»

Многим покажется, что второй вариант определённо лучше. Возможно он и лучше, однако подобная манипуляция клиентом вовсе не гарантия защиты от неудовлетворённых покупателей, ибо люди желают получить точное время прибытия сотрудника не потому, что им «просто так захотелось», а потому, что у них полно собственных дел (они заняты). Поэтому во многих случаях они согласятся ждать следующей недели, что авторы книги полностью исключили как возможный вариант. Да и в целом, с моей точки зрения, лучше быть честным и признать, что сотрудник может появиться только на следующей неделе или же он может подъехать завтра, но в промежутке с 8:00 до 20:00. Всё оставшуюся часть книги авторы посвятят подобной словесной манипуляции. Мало того, что это актуально лишь для call-центров, так и решения, на фоне первой половины книги, предлагаются довольно неоднозначные. Ну и самое, пожалуй, главное в этом контексте, это возможность всё это реализовать на практике. Зачастую на бумаге это всё легко прописать, а на деле,… а на деле сотрудники call-центра отражают культуру корпорации.

Я не утверждаю что предлагаемые авторами идеи, ошибочны и/или нереализуемы на практике. Вовсе нет. Просто с моей точки зрения нужно искать решение совсем с другой стороны, а не пытаться с помощью словесного манипулирования заполучить лояльных клиентов. Лучшее решение было озвучено авторами в первой половине книги: удаление всех затруднений, с которыми могут столкнуться клиенты при взаимодействии с компанией (покупка, послепродажный сервис и пр.). Если послепродажный сервис заключается в том, что вы отказываете покупателю в возврате бракованного товара, то какие бы техники словесной манипуляции вы бы не применяли, вы не сможете изменить негативное отношение этого клиента к вашей компании. И о своём опыте он обязательно расскажет максимально возможному числу людей. Вот здесь нужно искать решение, а не в формулировании ответа сотрудника call-центра.

This book is that rare exception where reading it a second time made me reconsider how I feel about it. One could say that the reason for this was the blatant advertising of the authors' services. In other words, this book is a well-camouflaged advertisement of the consulting services of the authors of this book. Perhaps those who liked the book a lot will either not notice this or not give serious consideration (to it). But from my point of view, the authors should not have flaunted their consulting services so much.

The reason why I liked the book the first time around can be found in the first half of the book. Generally speaking, the first half of the book is quite different from the second half, although the second half is kind of implied to be more practice-oriented. The only problem is that all the practice is narrowed down to call center customer service. Yes, you got it right - the first half of the book is about the services that companies provide to their customers, i.e., it is not about call centers but about all companies as such. Therefore, the first half of the book may be interesting and relevant to all companies that are concerned about the issue of quality customer service. Here, I fully agree with the authors that it is necessary to do everything possible to minimize the time and other costs of the client when they use the company's services. For example, if a customer goes to your company's website to order a product, the transaction should be as simple, clear (understandable), and short as possible. The more steps a customer has to take, the less satisfied the customer experience will be. In this regard, I was reminded of a wonderful and very famous book (on the same topic) called Don't Make Me Think! A common sense approach to web usability. Both books contain the same idea. There's nothing to argue with, of course. But if it's so obvious (and it really is self-evident to any marketer), what's the problem? The problem is that it requires not only efforts to think through how to simplify the client's interaction with the company as much as possible so that nothing breaks along the way. That's first, and second, it often leads to costs, and costs are something that CEOs don't like. So it all comes down to these two problems. However, this is the subject of the second half of the book.

In the second half, the authors decided to offer not only theoretical insights but also what it could/should look like in practice. To this end, they focused exclusively on call center operations. This is where I started to have doubts about the effectiveness of the proposed method and big questions for the authors. I admit that many readers will find the ideas proposed by the authors quite interesting and promising. Perhaps. But for me, they were not convincing enough - at best, and manipulative and dishonest - at worst. I'll give one example from the book. The authors describe a hypothetical conversation between a call center employee and a client and offer two options where the second one is more effective and correct from a business point of view.

Option A: "We can send you a specialist tomorrow, but we can't give you a specific time, so someone will have to be home between 8:00 and 20:00 to meet them. Is that OK with you?".

Option B: "It looks like the specialist who can come to you at exactly two hours will not be available until next week. But I think I could send a specialist to you tomorrow. He can't say at what specific time he will arrive, so someone must be at home between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. At any rate, everything will be done tomorrow instead of next week. I realize it's not entirely convenient, decide if that would suit you?"

Many people will think that the second option is better. Perhaps it is better, but such manipulation of the customer is not a guarantee of protection from unsatisfied customers because people want to get the exact time of arrival of the employee not because they "just wanted it so much" but because they have a lot of their own affairs (they are busy). Therefore, in many cases, they will agree to wait for the next week, which the authors have ruled out as a possible option. From my perspective, it's better to be honest and admit that an employee may not show up until next week, or he/she may drive up tomorrow but between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. The authors devote the entire rest of the book to this kind of verbal manipulation. Not only is it relevant only for call centers, but the solutions, against the background of the first half of the book, are rather ambiguous. And the most important thing in this context is the possibility to put it all into practice. It is easy to spell it out on paper, but in practice...in practice, call center employees reflect the culture of the corporation.

I am not claiming that the ideas proposed by the authors are wrong and/or unrealizable in practice. Not at all. It's just that from my point of view, we need to look for a solution from a different angle rather than trying to get loyal customers through verbal manipulation. The best solution was announced by the authors in the first half of the book: removing all the difficulties that customers may encounter when they interact with a company (purchase, after-sales service, etc.). If after-sales service consists of refusing to return a defective product to a customer, then no matter what verbal manipulation techniques you apply, you will not be able to change the negative attitude of this customer towards your company. And about his experience, he is sure to tell as many people as possible. This is where you need to look for a solution, not in the formulation of the call center employee's answer.

[Angela Lam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The essence of the book is this: customer service doesn’t drive loyalty, and it’s more important to reduce customer effort.

This is probably the best book I've read on customer service because:
1. It's backed by hard data
2. It's clearly structured with clear research findings + practical how-to tips and examples (even though this is a relatively new approach so the strategies/examples are not always very robust. there's still a load of practical stuff that can be used immediately by any company)
3. As a business owner and customer, I can really identify with the recommendations in the book. Every other CS book tells me fluffy stuff like why it's important to "wow" the customer and "go the extra mile"....the findings in this book rings true for me and I agree that as a customer, I sometimes just want things to be smooth and effortless .

BUT I feel that the bulk of the book's research and examples are focused on CS in the context of SERVICE RECOVERY, i.e. when customers contact you to resolve an issue. For people looking at service from a broader perspective, i.e. crafting a service experience as part of a wider USP, this book does NOT address it.

Because of that, I should've given the book 4*
But because it's soooohard to find really good CS books (and because the ideas were really useful), I'm giving it 5*

The book starts with 4 surprising research findings:
• It doesn’t pay to delight customers. Customers whose expectations were exceeded were only marginally more loyal than those whose expectations were met.
• Satisfaction doesn’t predict loyalty.
• Customer service interactions are 4x more likely to drive disloyalty than loyalty. [This is linked to my observation above that "CS" in this book seems to be used interchangeably with call-center services]
• Out of 5 main drivers of disloyalty, 4 had to do with customers' perceived effort to get their issue resolved. So, a key to reducing disloyalty is to reduce customer effort.

The rest of the book address how to go about creating and implementing an effortless experience.
It talks about the 4 pillars for reducing customer effort
• Make self-service easy and sticky
• Minimize repeat calls with “next issue avoidance”
• Reduce customers' perceived effort.
• Give reps more control over customer interactions.

Each of these 4 pillars came with really good tips/insights which I feel are the best part of the book
This is followed by a bunch of less impressive/comprehensive points about implementation. Granted, the authors caveat that the whole concept of an effortless expreinece is still relatively new so there aren't that many proven implementation frameworks yet.

Still, I'd highly recommend this for any one with responsibilities in customer service, business development or even sales and marketing.

Book summary at: https://readingraphics.com/book-summa...

[Malek · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is your classic business book, where you learn everything you need to know in the first chapter and the rest of the book is examples, reinforcement, and additional detail.

The central premise of the book, that customer loyalty has everything to do with being easy to work with and not necessarily "going above and beyond", is a helpful clarification for most companies. This book focuses on Contact Centers, while the last chapter shows examples of how to apply this to other environments.

I'll admit that the classic business book approach is not great for me personally as I tend to zone out when author's repeat/reinforce points they have already made. However, particularly for people who are involved with customer service and/or contact centers, the central premise of the book is valuable. As customers have transitioned away from personal contact to web-based and self-help, customer service approaches need to evolve to match.

[Chrisman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm glad that it was for bookclub, because the value of this book for me was in the discussions I had with coworkers about applying these thoughts and ideas to other domains, or to things that are specific to what we do.

I 100% agree with the underlying principle, but don't think I would have gotten as much out of it on my own.

[Greywood Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essential reading for those in business, especially managers, marketers and those involved with customer service. Want loyal customers? Reduce the effort of the customer at every touchpoint.

#effortlessread

[Chris Hofmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really a 4.5. I expected to hate this book. I almost wanted to hate it. I don’t like consultants and I’m usually very suspect of the books they publish because they’re typically a long sales pitch. This book didn’t fall into that trap. It also didn’t fall into business book trap of stretching a 25 page point over 200 pages. Each chapter typically offered something new and added value to their central thesis. I also thought it was going to all about selling the metric but as I was thinking “it’s only a question” they wrote “it’s only a question” and empathized the principal instead of a metric. Overall a must read for anyone involved in customer experience, especially those involving call centers.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful book based on the premise that the idea of “delighting the customer” is a fool’s errand for most organizations to chase. The truth is most users of your product don’t want to have to reach out for help or to troubleshoot; they just want it to work. This book covers strategies to diagnose where you are inflicting high amounts of customer effort and what you can do to reduce it. Enjoyed this book!

[Karthikeyan Muthusamy Sivanandham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book on the assumption that it would talk about customer buying experience. But, to my surprise ( or lack of proper research), I found that this book was only about after-purchase customer service experience. Hence, I started this book with not much involvement, but only to find myself pleasantly surprised with great insights into nuances of customer service experiences. The are many seemingly simple yet powerful insights discussed in the book.
1) customers are quick to punish bad service than to reward them for good service
2) Impact of customer service on loyalty (Satisfaction is not predictor of loyalty)
3) First Contact Resolution- channel switching efforts-Next issue avoidance (forward Resolve)
4) we pick companies bcos of their product but leave them bcos of their service failures
5) Customer Effort score
6) Experience Engineering - Advocacy (provide recommendation to customers), Positive language( resisting the use of words like "no", "can't"), Anchoring (positioning a given outcome as more positive and desirable by comparing it to another less desirable one)
7) The role of "Control Quotient" skills in Service reps' success; CQ - Resilient, Takes responsibility of own action, Responds well to constructive criticism (QTIP - Quit Taking It Personally), Able to concentrate on tasks over extended periods of time.
8) Quickly bucketing customers into one of the 4 personalities and tailoring the responses accordingly a) Controller (Result- oriented) b) Enetertainer (social-oriented) c) Thinker (Process-Oriented) d) Feeler (Empathy-Oriented)

[Alaeddin Hallak · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is some truly groundbreaking stuff in thinking about customer loyalty and customer experience! Backed by extensive research from all around the world, the author effectively make the case of reducing customer effort in order to mitigate customer disloyalty. They emphasize that this is not the latest fad in customer service, but a complete cultural shift that, when executed right, can have great impact on an organization's bottom line. Highly recommend this book for anyone involved in customer service, product design, or even intending on starting their own business.

[Brian Nicholson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Effortless Experience provides solid research supporting the pursuit of reducing customer effort as a way to drive loyalty. Much of the research and advice is focused on customer service, although reducing customer effort applies more broadly than that (as at least one chapter addresses). The authors make a good case for using CES (customer effort score) as a way to measure transactional relationship data, even if your company is already using something like NPS (net promoter score) for measuring overall relationship data.

[Daryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a lot of good information in this book, though it wound up being a bit drier than I had expected after reading the first few pages. It's obviously not for everybody. I'd recommend it for most anybody who's in the position of trying to figure out how to make products easier to use and support. I don't think I'm likely to run out and insist that my company shift its quality metrics to a Customer Effort Score system (what the book touts), but there were many things in the book that did make me think "we should do that."

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Depending on your wants and needs this book might be everything you need in the moment (or more), or not so much. In my case, I found it extremely valuable in regards to a current problem where FCR is an issue. We won't be moving away from that metric but I think we will improve our scores (and performance).

[Theodore Kinni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love the thesis here: Forget about delighting customers. If you want their business, make it effortless for them to give it to you. Simple and smart!

[Ana Claudia Santos-Cortez · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only reason I ain’t giving this book a 5-star rating is because I’m confident it didn’t explore the full potential of assessing experience in a more broad range of services and products. It focuses on contact center strategy and operations - which I absolutely understand since that was the forum assessed in the groups selected for the research - but two or three chapters extrapolating how such learnings could impact strategy in product companies would be the cherry on top of the cake.
I’m just sorry to not seeing more examples like the Apple stores one.

A very insightful book with representative data on what makes customers more loyal to a company considering both its product and service provided by front line agents.

Language and presentation can easily be understood by professionals that do not work, yet, directly in customer experience or service, as the authors put effort in explaining complex concepts as simple ones.

Personally I’ve learned from the book a few ideas on how to challenge my own management work and I’m confident others will take insights as well.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

super easy read with a lot of great points about why customer service should focus on making things easy. as a person in the industry working for a company that has based their care department on these principles, I found that there was little in the text that I didn't already know, though it's worth noting that the book was published in 2013 when the approach to customer service was much different across the industry. still, it was nice to have these ideas reinforced with data and examples to help back them up, and I feel better equipped to make informed decisions about coaching and QA within the company.

as a general critique of the book, there were lots of unnecessary charts that took simple figures from the text and made them into bar graphs. I'm not a particularly data-driven person; I have very little experience reading data or presenting it in a way that clearly communicates what it means. But this data was usually elementary and the only thing that I appreciated about the charts and graphs was that they broke up the text with some fun pictures lmao

[Eduardo Xavier · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it comes to customer services, you're going to hear a lot about delight customer. Mathew Dixon present his empirical quantitative research showing numbers that would change out vision about this and focus on customer engagement by mitigating risk of disloyalty. He explores and explain numbers and services scenarios, describing what irritates customers, take our attention to he calls the Next Issue Avoidance, which is about being proactive, taking measures understand people, treat them with principles and positive languages. He delves into experience engineering which reminds something between of being proactive and persuasive. He shows off techniques to do that, also samples and good framework to start anew.
I really enjoy this work because of my context at moment, it has a kind of general view but also present a practical path in order to fit as guidance.
I do recommend to any who never had to deal about build a customer service yet.

[Jacek Bartczak · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the 3rd book written by M. Dixon:
- "The Challenger Sale" was about changing how potential clients view his problem,
- "The Challenger Customer" was about helping the client dealing with his customer buying process,
- "The Effortless Experience" is about reducing effort connection with product/service.

The book about customer service. About that kind of customer service who deals with inquiries like "my internet connection is not working" or "I cannot log in to my account" - rather simple repeatable issues. 

Some thoughts are applicable in "deeper" customer service as well - wherever some kind of relationship between company and client / potential client appears:
- delight your customers ---> reduce effort connected with your product/service,
- "No, it is not possible" ---> "in your case, the best option is...",
- "be nice" ---> find a way to help your client,
- "solve customer issue" ---> help client avoids next issue.

[LeAnn · Rating 4 out of 5]

When reading a "technical" book for work, I always assume the worst. This wasn't too bad. Most of it was written in a digestible format in terms of language, terminology, and examples. The charts and graphs were not my favorite, but I'm sure more visual learners appreciated those. I'm part of a team at my bank where we are working on improving customer experience, and this book hit a lot of points that were useful to us. We will be taking some ideas and putting them into action for the upcoming year. Overall, the book was easy to read and useful to my/our purpose. Some chapters were a little long for my liking and some technical parts were hard to digest or translate are my two points of criticism. P.S. It took me almost five months to read due to the schedule of reading we followed as a team. :-)

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly Recommend. I enjoyed the inspiring perspective, good structure and practical guidance in this book.

"Let Numbers speak" is an impressive characteristic of this book. Those numbers challenge the common belief that customer loyalty is driven by exceeding customer expectations. Analysed with data statistics, Matthew Dixon offered an inspiring perspective of realizing customer loyalty, which could redefine the service philosophy and the role of customer service. “the role of customer service is to mitigate disloyalty by reducing customer effort.” Customers want effortless experience. Besides the convincing findings of customer loyalty, author also gave advices on tactical techniques.

[Zoffix Znet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly good book, of similar quality to others made by CEB.

Data-backed model that shows customer service controls disloyalty and all the feel-good stories about customer service reps doing extraordinary things not only don't help much the bottom line, but are hard to train the reps for.

Instead, the authors propose Effort as the key component in maintaining loyalty. Is it easy to deal with your company? Do customers need to switch channels often, e.g. starting on web but having to call? Do customers get transferred to multiple people?

The first 65% of the book were strong and had lots of good insight. The rest, I found a bit muddled in jargon, or spending pages and pages trying to back up earlier statements, which I found obvious and trusted the authors with.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main point is that businesses are focused on giving clients a "delightful experience" when they should be focused on making the customer experience as effortless as possible. They provide lots and lots of study results to back up this up and to tell the reader how businesses have achieved this. At first the studies were interesting but there were too many and if became a slog to read through them. Just tell me what works and shy and how to out it into effect. Most of this was about call centers and responding to customers who have to try more than one channel to sol e their problems- website, call, second call - and how trying to foresee what the next problem the customer might have can avoid a second call etc. Interesting but could have been shorter and less repetitious.

[Chad Horenfeldt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for anyone in customer support. I came away with it having ideas for the overall customer success function. I believe there is too much emphasis placed on delighting the customer then trying to get the outcomes that drive real value. “Delight” only goes so far. I found the book to have tactical approaches that make compete sense. This isn’t an easy read but they do try by adding great examples. The book also ties the concepts together well at the end. The last chapter helps you think about how to apply these concepts beyond the call center.

I would also give this to your support managers as well.

[Mike Trigg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd put this up there with Matthew Dixon's previous book, the Challenger Sale. This book is equally thought provoking and disruptive to conventional wisdom for customer service leaders as the Challenger Sale was to sales leaders. Though probably not as interesting as a general business book, The Effortless Experience presents a new and compelling way of thinking about how to drive customer loyalty by minimizing the "effort" (measured by "Customer Effort Score") it requires to do business with your company. Great read for anyone responsible for customer service/support/success/experience in their organization.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid book for corporate world pertaining to call center and chat based environments. Interesting data. Definitely could relate to having to enter automated info only to then have to repeat again to a live agent. That is always exasperating as a customer. Read this for work. Seems some of the personalized customer service experience has gone away with this approach, but working smarter and making it easier and more efficient is the sign of the times. Would have loved to have seen some tips for face to face customer experiences and data , re a Starbucks barista serving you coffee because in that area there needs to be improvement.

[Krystina Maloukis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great insight on the world of customer service and customer success! Built around the premise that customers want their needs and expectations met more than to be delighted by their customer service experience, this text does a great job of including real world examples to support their findings and audience comprehension. As someone who is new to the field, standout concepts for me include customer service does not equal customer satisfaction, the idea that reducing customer effort is the key to mitigating customer disloyalty, and examples for effectively measuring customer effort.

[Stephanie Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who is new to the philosophy of reducing customer effort, The Effortless Experience was such a valuable read. I appreciate how the authors used concrete statistics, real-life case studies, and plain language to explain the value of focusing reducing effort and helping customers serve themselves. Highly recommended to those entering the customer service industry and want to make a difference for the organization they're working with.

[Drew Clancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many good insights for customer service leaders and managers. The authors do a great job of capturing the changing nature of customer or client expectations - and how organizations need to react. They begin the book by saying that client delight is the wrong goal (which I disagree with). My sense is they make this point more to get attention as the remainder of the book outlines many worthwhile strategies on how to train customer service teams to delight customers.