Why delighting customers is a flawed strategy

I'm reading a fascinating book called The Effortless Experience, by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi. They have gathered hundreds of thousands of customer service (CS) data points from across the world. Here is a very short description of 3 big findings:

1. Delighting with exceptional CS doesn't pay. Its very hard to accomplish with any consistency, its very expensive, and it doesn't create more loyal customers. The authors show that exceptional CS costs about 10-20% more than 'good' CS, but the incremental increase in customer loyalty is negligible. 

2. Satisfied customers aren't necessarily loyal. The relationship between satisfaction and loyalty is very small indeed. 20% of satisfied customers still intend to stop buying from a company, and 28% of dissatisfied ones intend to remain loyal. So customer satisfaction scores aren't a good predicator of future loyalty. The R squared relationship score is a measly 0.13, whereas a perfect correlation would be 1.0. 

3. Customer service is high risk and low reward. A positive CS experience results in approximately 25% of customers spreading positive word of mouth. Compare that to the 75% of customers who share negative word of mouth if they have a poor experience - and they tell a greater number of people too.

These 3 findings are why the authors argue the purpose of customer service is to 'mitigate disloyalty', rather than attempting to drive loyalty. And the way to do it, as the title suggests, is to remove as much customer effort from the CS experience as possible.