May podcast roundup: The origins of customer effort

Matt Dixon, Ted McKenna

May 27, 2021

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Exciting news! We’re on podcast #2, this time discussing one of our favorite topics: Customer effort. Throughout this series, titled “Customer Effort: Through an AI Lens”, Chief Research & Innovation Officer Matt Dixon and SVP of Research & Innovation Ted McKenna discuss topics relevant to customer experience and customer care leaders alike. In the first few episodes, tune in to learn about the origins of customer effort research, the story of the inception of the research that led to The Effortless Experience, and some of our initial findings from the first study on effort. 

Check out the highlights from each episode in the list below: 

Episode 1: Introduction

In the first episode, we talk about who this series is for, and what we’ll cover. Followers of The Effortless Experience will recognize a lot of the material early in this series. This is intentional! We wanted to both summarize the material from the book for those who are new to it, and to address in later episodes some of the questions that we’ve received in the time since publication. Also, it’s important to note that it’s been ten years since some of the original research was done, and we’ve learned quite a bit since then!

Episode 2: Origins of Effort

Here in the second episode, we dive into the first questions that led us to our original research on effort. Senior leaders in sales and service roles across the nation all wanted to know the answers to the same tough questions: Why are my customers becoming disloyal? Why do they churn out? And what can we do in the service channel to keep our customers loyal? We answered these questions and more by debunking the theory of Customer Delight and postulating our own answer: A low-effort customer experience.

Episode 3: The Big Findings

In this episode, we explore the big findings from our initial research, plus the business case for a low effort customer experience. Our initial research yielded the following big takeaways: delight doesn't pay, service drives disloyalty, and that you can mitigate disloyalty by reducing effort. These three findings have since revolutionized the way that dedicated CX practitioners think about improving service. Plus, we found that reducing effort can yield significant returns for both bottom and top line in organizations that commit to implementation. 

But that’s not all! Now that we’ve brought to light the origins of customer effort (and our very first research on the subject), there’s a lot more ground left to cover. Over the next nine weeks, we’ll release one episode a week in order to fully chronicle our journey with customer effort. We’ll explore the enduring relevance of customer effort over time, look at some examples of ROI, and even get into some ways we’ve adapted our capabilities based on new data. All in all, there’s a lot to look forward to.

To stay up-to-date with upcoming episodes, make sure to sign up here, or subscribe on your listening platform of choice.

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