Make 2025 a Year to ‘Forget’ in Customer Experiences
Going into 2025, your internal teams may be brainstorming ways to dazzle your customers.
“What can we do to make this interaction stand out? To give it the wow factor?”
While “wow!” experiences are nice, it’s the quick, easy experiences (and not the amazing ones) that are more responsible for building brand loyalty across your customer base. According to Gartner, 96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal , as opposed to 9% of customers with low-effort interactions. Building loyalty and reducing churn are central to any brand’s CX strategy, especially considering that it can take three new customers to replace the value of one customer who churns.
To improve customer experience (CX) and bolster loyalty, it’s not counterintuitive to say that brands should focus on delivering journeys that are so quick and easy, they’re forgettable.
Customer Experiences We'll Remember (For the Wrong Reasons) From 2024
Consider these negative memorable interactions that CSG employees experienced in 2024:
Telco: Taking advantage of a cellular promotion to add a line and get a free phone was far from easy for Erin. The first phone was sent to the wrong address, and the second phone didn’t have the correct phone number ported in. After spending two hours on the phone with customer support and sales, repeating the problem several times, Erin went to the store to pick up phone number three. When the phone still didn’t activate after 24 hours, she was forced to call customer support AGAIN. This time the call was escalated to a more intensive level of support and the problem was resolved in five minutes.
Retail: Danielle was surprised (not in a good way) to receive an email promoting a pair of jeans—the same ones she had purchased the day before. A few weeks later, she was asked to complete a survey for another product (not the jeans) that she had already returned. While these situations weren’t stressful, they revealed that the retail brand didn’t know Danielle, and she now associates the brand with cluelessness.
Banking: Beth called her bank to request that money that had been refunded to her credit card be transferred to her checking account. After hearing that it would take 30 days to “investigate” her request, Beth asked for and was promised expedited service. She was told that an email confirmation wasn’t possible, but that she would be notified when the money was transferred. When Beth checked her online bank statement 10 days later, she discovered that the money had been transferred, but she never received a notification. Not exactly a trust-inspiring situation.
