Customer reception: expertise does not guarantee clarity
At the first point of contact, knowing a service thoroughly can make its access barriers less visible. The managerial question is specific: how can we check whether an explanation enables the customer to take the next step, without overestimating what they already know?
What the literature establishes
Pamela J. Hinds (1999, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied) studied how people with different levels of expertise predict novice performance. Her work shows that expertise can be accompanied by an underestimation of the time beginners need to complete a task. For customer reception, this finding highlights a risk: the ease with which an employee navigates a portal or identifies a document does not measure how easy the process is for the customer.
The mechanism: setting aside what we know is difficult
Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber (1989, Journal of Political Economy) demonstrated, in experimental economic settings, how difficult it is for informed participants to set aside their knowledge when predicting the judgement of less informed participants. This “curse of knowledge” offers a plausible mechanism for understanding some incomplete explanations at the first point of contact. An employee may omit a prerequisite precisely because it seems self-evident.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that experienced employees should be replaced by beginners, or that every explanation should invariably be simplified. These studies do not support such a prescription: anticipating a novice’s difficulties is only one dimension of service quality. The challenge is instead to combine expertise with a check of what the customer can actually do after the exchange. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these findings cannot establish
These studies do not directly examine customer reception in Zurich’s banks, insurance companies or technology businesses. They therefore cannot quantify the effect of a different explanation on satisfaction or repeat contacts. In practice, a difficulty may also stem from missing access rights, an interface or the language used: automatically attributing it to the employee would be another diagnostic error.
A practical check in Zurich
As part of SHR’s “Accueil client” programme, a Zurich team in financial services, insurance, tech or the European headquarters of an international group can test a common procedure in a demonstration environment containing no personal data. For two weeks, after the usual explanation, invite the customer to perform the first action, then record the proportion of observed attempts completed without additional help, distinguishing between languages and levels of familiarity with the service. Next, revise just one element of the explanation and repeat the observation for the same procedure: the comparison provides a local indicator of independence, not causal proof or an employee ranking. To go further: explore the Client Reception training in Zurich, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Client Reception in Zurich
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