This is my second paper on Resentment, writes Nigel Waterson, Partner at Curzon & Company LLP, who is fascinated by what causes it and the consequences for companies when your customers resent you.
In the first paper I concluded that:
1. It takes clear thinking and bold decisions at senior levels to see through what may be accepted norms to the root of resentment. Silent resenters are more likely to disappear before your CRM processes get to them!
2. You need credible financial modelling to understand the cost of removing the resentment.
3. Finally the whole organisation needs to get behind the new approach once you’ve designed and tested it.
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Recent events bear out my assertions. In Paris, Brandalism.org.uk has given ecological resentment a public voice ahead of the UN COP21 climate conference, with the installation of 600 fake adverts on the Paris streets. JCDecaux’s advertising frames were opened and professional quality adverts deriding Volkswagen, Air France and a host of world leaders for their alleged lip service to the climate change agenda were installed.
Faced with these high profile displays of resentment, there is a need for: clear thinking at senior levels, a financial impact analysis and a unified response. At a global level, even facilitated by the UN, this is clearly difficult. My experience is that within commercial organisations it’s just as difficult to get the necessary co-ordination.
If your company is creating resentment, it’s likely that the resenters are not as high profile as Brandalism. Are their important messages just whispered and your response similarly uncoordinated?
Perhaps some clear thinking from the recent past would help you to set out the arguments to improve how you approach customer care and avoid creating resentment.
In recent years two works have notably changed perceptions of what Customer Care should be about. In 2010 A Harvard Business Review article, entitled ‘Stop Trying to Delight Customers’, challenged the then pervasive idea that “delight” was the goal for customer service. The idea that exceeding customer expectations led to better satisfaction and retention was dismantled:
? Nearly 90% of customer service heads were trying to exceed expectation
? 84% of customers said their expectations weren’t met
? 20% of satisfied customers planned to leave anyway
? 28% of dissatisfied customers planned to stay
The authors proposed a different approach based on reducing customer effort, showing that high effort created resentment and less effort created loyalty. Their advice can be
summarised as:
1. Head off repeat calls.
2. Help staff get close to the customer’s emotions and if you have to let them down
find a positive way to do it.
3. Make the channels (like online help) work so well that people stick with them.
4. Analyse the feedback from customers who are finding it difficult and use it to reduce effort.
5. Make reducing customer effort a priority for front line staff.
This was coupled with the idea of a Customer Effort Score. This was a measure of how much effort the customer had to expend and was found to be a better predictor of loyalty than conventional “how satisfied are you” Customer SATisfaction (CSAT) scores. The HBR
researchers found 94% of customers reporting low effort also intended to re-purchase.
Since then we’ve seen the rise of Net Promoter. It’s a useful metric of customer intention but by itself doesn’t get close to the behavioural understanding that an analysis of customer effort provides.
Advancing the “effort” argument fell to a second work. In 2013, Professor Moira Clark and Andrew Bryan in their paper ‘Customer Effort: Help or hype’, refined our understanding of the benefits of focussing on customer effort to improve service.
Some of their key findings were:
? Effort is a key predictor of loyalty, especially where effort is high.
? “How easy?” is a better than “how much effort?”.
? The highest returns are from fixing situations where customers expect “easy” but get “hard”.
What was encouraging about this research from a Telecoms perspective was that BT
were in the vanguard as proponents of Net Easy; an adaption of the Net Promoter
scoring idea based on how easy the customer experience is. BT’s data showed a 40% reduction in churn propensity when customers had scored “easy” versus “difficult”.
So in summary there’s already some clear thinking been done about placing an emphasis on customer effort and how that informs opportunities to make things even easier. It’s a useful starting point if you’re trying to avoid resentment. Keep making it difficult and resentment may follow.
What’s really interesting from the Clark and Bryan paper is the lack of supporting
business cases for the pioneering companies who embraced the original ideas on effort from 2010. To me it looks like they were able to sustain investment in analysing effort because “it was the right thing to do”. Put another way, they were making a moral choice towards values that they believed the customer would recognise. Resentment comes
when you break someone’s moral code.
If your company finds it hard to invest on the basis of “the right thing” then you should construct the outline business case and use it to press for change and get everyone on board. Here at Curzon we usually start our customer experience projects with a top down business case – in part to win the unanimous support of the Executive for the journey ahead.
“Easy” might not be the full answer to customer resentment but it’s a great place to start.
