To keep customers from jumping to rivals, and to reduce your support costs, you must minimize customer effort and simplify, simplify, simplify.
That’s the overriding theme from our fourth annual survey of Communication Service Providers (CSPs.) From online ordering to mobile web apps, responses from nearly 2,000 U.S. customers showed they want simpler ways to choose, buy, pay for and get help with services such as high speed Internet, pay TV and phone.
For example, our survey showed:
What would simpler offerings look like? Examples include.
The Road to Simplicity
Among the ways you can improve your customers’ lives (and your business) through simplicity:
Move beyond focus groups and conventional market research to ethnographic research that studies customers in the real world to better identify their needs.
Rework complex legacy systems and processes from a “customer first” perspective to maximize simplicity.
Empower customer-facing employees to offer real-time refunds or credits to compensate for service outages or delayed repairs. Combined with insights from data analytics, this could turn a problem into an opportunity to cross or upsell. (“We see you’ve experienced extensive load times on Netflix over the last few days. Along with our apology we’re giving you two weeks of free access to our premium sports channel…”)
Figure 1
In the following Perspectives we’ll describe in more detail the need for simplicity, what a “service made simple” digital model entails, how to achieve it and finally how to reduce customer effort in your next wave of products and services.
For additional study insights, see our infographic; to learn more about our communications services, visit our website.