The art of creating a brilliant customer experience often involves deciding when to be extremely efficient, and when to be gratuitously inefficient. Let’s use communications as an example.

A text message might be the best solution for one situation because it’s instant, easily digestible, cheap and convenient. Hyper-efficient interactions can be very valuable because they save time and effort.

However, a hand-written thank-you note on high-quality paper, FedEx’ed overnight from the other side of the world is way more effective than an email because of the discretionary effort and expense involved.

Any signal that imposes costs on the sender is more trustworthy, and anything that creates that, “You really didn’t have to do that!” feeling in the customer is worth its weight in gold.

Both approaches can be spectacularly successful and can even work very well together depending on the context. But most improvements end up in the middle ground — they are neither efficient enough to be noticeably more effortless than alternatives, not inefficient in a way that conveys discretionary effort, thoughtfulness or attention to detail. They’re just kind of half-assed, combining the worst of both worlds.

This just in: half-assed is not a winning strategy in competitive markets.

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