Why “Why Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You” is absolutely wrong…

As a writer, I’ve been there.

You sit at your laptop and try to come up with a catchy title that will sell books, spike hits to your blog, or get re-Tweeted a bunch of times.

The problem, however, is sometimes you may actually come up with a concept so provocative, your title works extraordinarily well.

And, then you have to stretch to create content to match your headline…you overreach…attempt to be contrarian to generate attention…and end up with something that’s flat out wrong.

Such is the case of the oft-cited post “Why Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You” and the corresponding article in “Harvard Business Review” titled “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers.”

(Ironically featured in the same edition as an article on Zappos.com and how Tony Hsieh and team built their empire on customer service.)

The post complains “corporate leaders dramatically overestimate the extent to which their customers actually want to talk to them. In fact, on average, companies tend to think their customers value live service more than twice as much as they value self service. But our data show that customers today are statistically indifferent about this — they value self-service just as much as using the phone.”

OK…how much do you love the service you’re currently getting over the phone? That’s a pretty low standard. I was “served” today by XM Radio on the phone by a voice recognition system that couldn’t understand me and a CSR that had a hard time helping me. It was a bitter piece of hell in an otherwise terrific day.

The authors — Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman of Corporate Executive Board — continue: “Running your company as if customers want to talk to you isn’t just expensive, it’s potentially undermining your efforts to build longer-term loyalty.” And, “As one CFO remarked to us recently, ‘When you think about the relative cost of live service and the disloyalty effect of channel switching…it’s like paying your customers to be disloyal to you.’”

Good grief.

First off, the customer service heads they surveyed who said their “main strategy” is to “exceed expectations” are ill-informed managers. They presume they know what their customers REALLY want…and, as you may already know from my earlier research and book…that’s just not the case.

You can’t exceed expectations you don’t understand.

Second, they point out the statistical analysis that there is no strong correlation between “satisfied customers” and “loyal customers.” Well…I wrote that almost a decade ago in “ALL Business is Show Business” — and my buddy Jeffrey Gitomer was shouting it from the mountaintop with “Customer Satisfaction is Worthless – Customer Loyalty is Priceless.”

Here’s a wild concept: Customers are people.

PEOPLE don’t like to deal with anybody who is wrong, incompetent, unhelpful, or any of the other qualities we find off-putting or offensive. This means if your company has people like that…we don’t want to talk to them.

As I wrote earlier, there are three levels of customer interaction. They are progressive — we have to achieve fulfillment in one level before our efforts in a higher level have traction. The first is Processing — it’s getting it right.

Here’s another point where the article is dead wrong. If the self-serve gets it right, and we perceive the person will get it wrong…we naturally head to the self-serve. If, however, the kiosk is confusing, has less selection of what we seek, gives us too many options, or any of a number of other problems…we want to talk to someone. It’s not about one system being superior…it’s about ease of use and accuracy.

Would Nordstrom have more fans if you bought shoes from a computer kiosk and they came out of a machine like buying a drink at a vending machine? Hmmm…to take it to the extreme, would Southwest REALLY be better if they just had self-serve flight attendants? Come on…

Loyalty is only generated by the highest of the three levels — Experience. It adds personalization and emotion to the equation of your customer relationship.

Why does Apple have remarkable customer loyalty — higher than, for example, Dell’s? Maybe, in part, because the Genius Bar is NOT “self-serve.”

In the Harvard article, the authors state: “The immediate mission is clear: Corporate leaders must focus their service organizations on mitigating disloyalty by reducing customer effort.”

Oh man….I hope MY competition reads and adopts that strategy.

In the meantime…my suggestion is the wise organization must “get it right” (processing), improve efficiency and connectivity for the customer (service), and integrate emotion and personalization into your efforts (experience).

If you execute that approach…the customer loyalty for which you lust will become the steadfastness from clients you secure.

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