Jun 10, 2014 By Rick DeLisi

3 Reasons Your CEO Cares About Creating an Effortless Service Experience

in Featured, Customer Service

This whole “low-effort” customer service trend (which so many of you have been talking about and exploring for a number of years now) is now becoming red hot everywhere. Since the release of our book The Effortless Experience we have seen a sudden spike in interest from people in every corporate function outside our own world.

But perhaps something more telling, came with our invitation to speak at a meeting of the Australian CEO Forum. Picture 40 CEOs and General Managers in a room in rapt attention for over an hour as many of them were hearing about the direct link between customer loyalty and a low-effort customer experience for the first time.

Based on the interactions I had during and following the presentation, here are three reasons why chief executives are so interested in this idea:

1. CEOs care about one thing: the bottom line

And becoming a world-class low-effort company contributes significantly to economic success; both because it has a positive impact on loyalty, and because it reduces operating costs. The function formerly known as Customer Service is now increasingly thought of as a pivotal anchor in the much more compelling notion of “the customer experience.”

2. Reducing customer effort is a thing that can be done

CEOs like tangible things. Customer satisfaction, or “willingness to recommend” (while both are very important at some level) seem more squishy and amorphous. They are more like serendipitous outcomes, rather than direct inputs.

3. Every CEO in the world is also a customer

Next time you run into your CEO in any kind of conversational situation, ask what kinds of service experiences he/she personally hates. What bugs them about doing business with the companies they’ve known in their away-from-work world? Chances are very great that whatever they say next will be a laundry list of high-effort experiences.

Are you seeing what we’re seeing here? The time is right—right now—for you and your Customer Service team to take your rightful position as a significant contributor to the overall strategic and economic success of your company. And to blip-blip-blip yourself into the center circle of your CEO’s radar screen.

For much more on this topic, joing DeLisi's "The Effortless Experience" co-author, Nick Toman, for the free webinar "The Key Pillars For Delivering Effortless Customer Experience," June 12th at 11 am PST / 2 pm EST. Click here to register.