You can probably think of a few examples, such as the traveler who makes a point of returning to a hotel that has a particularly attentive staff. But you probably can't come up with many.

Now ask yourself: How often do consumers cut companies loose because of terrible service? All the time.

They exact revenge on airlines that lose their bags, cable providers whose technicians keep them waiting, cellular companies whose reps put them on permanent hold, and dry cleaners who don't understand what "rush order" means.

Consumers' impulse to punish bad service — at least more readily than to reward delightful service — plays out dramatically in both phone-based and self-service interactions, which are most companies' largest customer service channels.

In those settings, our research shows, loyalty has a lot more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic, even plain-vanilla promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be. Yet most companies have failed to realize this and pay dearly in terms of wasted investments and lost customers.

Trying Too Hard

According to conventional wisdom, customers are more loyal to firms that go above and beyond. But research shows that exceeding their expectations during service interactions (for example, by offering a refund, a free product, or a free service such as expedited shipping) makes customers only marginally more loyal than simply meeting their needs.

For leaders who cut their teeth in the service department, this is an alarming finding. What contact center doesn't have a wall plastered with letters and e-mails from customers praising the extra work that service reps went to on their behalf? Indeed, 89 of the 100 customer service heads we surveyed said that their main strategy is to exceed expectations. But despite these Herculean — and costly — efforts, 84% of customers told us that their expectations had not been exceeded during their most recent interaction.

One reason for the focus on exceeding expectations is that fully 80% of customer service organizations use customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores as the primary metric for gauging the customer's experience. And managers often assume that the more satisfied customers are, the more loyal they will be. But, we find little relationship between satisfaction and loyalty. Twenty percent of the "satisfied" customers in our study said they intended to leave the company in question; 28% of the "dissatisfied" customers intended to stay.

The picture gets bleaker still. Although customer service can do little to increase loyalty, it can (and typically does) do a great deal to undermine it. Customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal than loyal.

Another way to think about the sources of customer loyalty is to imagine two pies — one containing things that drive loyalty and the other containing things that drive disloyalty. The loyalty pie consists largely of slices such as product quality and brand; the slice for service is quite small. But service accounts for most of the disloyalty pie. We buy from a company because it delivers quality products, great value, or a compelling brand. We leave one, more often than not, because it fails to deliver on customer service.

Make It Easy

Let's return to the key implication of our research: When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily. Armed with this understanding, we can fundamentally change the emphasis of customer service interactions. Framing the service challenge in terms of making it easy for the customer can be highly illuminating, even liberating, especially for companies that have been struggling to delight. Telling frontline reps to exceed customers' expectations is apt to yield confusion, wasted time and effort, and costly giveaways. Telling them to "make it easy" gives them a solid foundation for action.