“Have it your way,” has been Burger King’s motto on-and-off for the past three decades. No matter what you think about the food (my thoughts: great french fries, and great memories eating their chicken sandwich growing up) the slogan is a classic. It orients Burger King, its 34,000 employees, and its nearly 13,000 franchised restaurants, towards a common goal: treat the customer right.
It’s also malleable – like when you want to get edgy with ads like this:
But I digress. This blog post isn’t a dissertation about fast-food hamburger advertising, but about customer service. Obviously, every company pays lip service to to the idea of making their customers’ experience great. But lots of things get in the way. The need to cut costs, or be efficient with finite resources.
Tradeoffs are a normal part of business. But the costs of poor customer service have traditionally been underappreciated, because they used to be indirect, hard to measure, and took place over a long time (longer than the typical executive tenure, anyway).
Today companies better understand the costs and benefits of their customer service strategy, due to things like Net Promoter Scores and concepts like Customer Lifetime Value. Data increasingly shows that high-effort, tiring experiences drive customers away.
Take this survey released today by Harris Interactive (and sponsored by Avaya). 66% of the 2,100 U.S. adults surveyed by Harris said that they will leave companies that make getting customer service “high effort.” 37% say they are extremely likely to leave.
That begs the question: what’s high effort? And what are the benefits of reducing customer service friction? I don’t want to give away too much of the interesting findings revealed by the infographic below, but suffice to say that the numbers are clear: treat your customers better and you’ll reap the financial rewards. You can download the Dinosaur Office-themed infographic by right-clicking and saving on the image, or click here to download a multi-page PDF that you can print on 8.5 x 11 paper.
