The Effortless Experience

companies tend to grossly underestimate the benefit of simply meeting customer expectations. In a world in which customer expectations are significantly inflated and seemingly on the rise all the time, what we find is that customers are in fact quite happy to simply get what was promised them. If there happens to be a problem, just resolve it quick

To be precise, according to our research, any customer service interaction is four times more likely to drive disloyalty than to drive loyalty (see figure 1.5).

Customer service is the crucible of the customer experience—the place where all of the company’s claims, its mission and its values, are tested. And it’s been a long-held belief in business that when your customer is most in need of help and you deliver an “above and beyond” service experience, you are effectively building a moat around your custom

Once you’re consistently meeting the expectations of the majority of your customers, you’ve already done the most economically valuable thing you can do.