The Complexity of Customer Simplicity

iStock_000062387494Large

Last week I had to call my cable company to accomplish what I thought would be a simple task: getting a replacement modem.

I was quickly reminded why most consumers hate their cable companies. I’ll save you the gory details of the experience and just provide the bullet points:

• three days
• seven calls
• three transfers, including two disconnects
• at least two hours on hold
• four chat sessions
• a couple of hours on the website
• five emails and
• one trip to the closest retail service outlet for my cable provider.

And as of this morning, still no modem.

All this complexity, and frustration, got me thinking: why are so many customer experiences so unnecessarily complicated? Of course, customers clearly want simplicity in their interactions. But so do most Fortune 500 companies. This is what Verde sees in our work with clients, which are a pretty good representation of the Fortune 500:

Marketing wants customer experience simplicity.
Choice is good. But the exponential growth of options when consumers consume – brands, models, channels, retailers – raises the stakes for clarity and ease of consideration/purchase. Experience simplicity reduces cognitive overload and moves barriers to purchase out of the way.

Service Operations wants customer experience simplicity.
The more complexity in customer experience, the higher the service costs. And not just because complexity requires customer service staff to handle more calls; experience complexity also drives service cycle times, rep turnover and capital investment. Experience simplicity means fewer calls, easier calls, less rep burnout and more straightforward service technology investments. Oh, and service reps could spend more time on interactions with customers that grow their value instead of defending against customer defection.

The C-Suite wants customer experience simplicity.
The less energy customers have to spend managing their relationship with a brand, the more energy they have to invest in enjoying the brand promise. The outcomes: greater loyalty, advocacy, spend and commitment. Which means more revenue, more market share and superior competitive position.

So all of us – customers and companies, executives and front-line sales service reps – want pretty much the same thing: simplicity. So isn’t it surprising that more companies haven’t cracked the code on making their customer experiences simple?

Not really. Paradoxically, simplicity is actually pretty complicated. For any specific company there will be numerous reasons – cultural, financial, technical, operational – why customer simplicity is difficult to achieve. But at Verde we see three common reasons why companies struggle so hard to simplify customer experiences:

1. High quality simplicity depends on flawless integration of a complex set of business processes. 
From the outside looking in, I’d guess my less-than-simple cable experience resulted from the intersection of at least: poor hiring/training practices, inadequate technology infrastructure, sloppy marketing communications, unreasonable corporate goal-setting and short-sighted financial policies. If I was on the inside, my list would probably expand. Syncing all these processes up to deliver simple-yet-high quality experiences without sacrificing long term customer profitability is a very complex task.

2. Change is hard.
Even when companies have a good grasp of what is required to deliver a high quality customer simplicity, making the changes necessary to meet those requirements requires fortitude, focus and discipline. Very few meaningful changes in the customer experiences can rely on quick hit “silver bullet” solutions at a single point of the value chain. Staying on plan over time – and knowing how well you are progressing – is critical to simplifying customer experience.

3. Knowing what matters to the customer is really hard.
This is the big one. You may have noted our use of the adjective “meaningful” in my bullet above. Companies purposefully invest in a multitude of customer experience improvements every year, but many of these are not “meaningful”: they don’t matter to the customer and they don’t improve profitability or share. Consider for a moment the hundreds of experiences that comprise your customers’ relationship with your company. Which ones matter the most to loyalty and advocacy? Just as important: which ones don’t? Are you investing your energies and resources where you’ll get the highest return in customer equity?

Customer experience simplicity is complex. But all is not lost. There are specific proven ways to cut through all the complexity and align the organization against the experiences that really matter to loyalty and customer value.

Subscribe to this blog and go to Part II of this post, Which “Silent Experiences” Are Killing Your Customer Loyalty?, where we’ll share our thoughts on those tactics and provide some examples of companies who “cracked the simplicity code” and reaped significant gains.

Jon Skinner
Executive Vice President, The Verde Group

To Learn more about Jon Skinner

Executive Vice President of The Verde Group
Jon Skinner