Effortless Engagement

When trying to consider what makes the perfect customer experience there are three key elements I use. The first is helpfulness; are they really prepared to help me? The second is value for time; do they respect and make efficient use of my time? And third is customer recognition; when I contact them do they acknowledge me as an individual? 

Typically when businesses try to predict customer loyalty they look at customer satisfaction, which is actually a poor measure of customer loyalty. They use statistics garnered from metrics such as Net Promoter Score. However, just because we are a satisfied customer does not mean we will go back and spend again. 

A great measure of customer loyalty is the Customer Effort Score research, which has come out of Harvard and measures the predictive power for re-purchasing and the predictive power of increased spending. Customer Effort Score outperforms Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) in predicting repurchasing and has highlighted that it is increasingly important for businesses to make it easy to be a customer. 

Who Are You? A Leading Health Insurance Plan Wants to Know

A large health insurance plan and AVOKE customer recently used AVOKE Analytics to improve the identification process in their IVR. They knew that members struggled to provide their ID, but needed to understand the specific reasons why - and what changes would improve the process. The company wanted to both reduce the amount of effort required to use the IVR, and increase the number of members that successfully identified in the IVR.  

NPS, CSAT or Customer Effort Score – which metric is right for your business?

By Charlie Cowan NewVoiceMedia Blog

As the saying goes – you can’t manage what you don’t measure.  To overcome this many companies look to a single metric that they can use to measure the health of their company and that business leaders can use to predict future performance of the organisation.

No one question can give all the answers needed across a business – but compromises have to be made between the simplicity of a single question and a drawn out survey that results in a poor response rate.  A single question can be asked frequently and across multiple industries and countries giving business leaders a sense of momentum of their own organisation and comparison with others.

Which question to choose?

With many options out there, which single question is the best measure of today and predictor of future performance?

How Two Companies Targeted Their Customer Effort Reduction Projects

Over the summer we introduced the Customer Effort Assessment - CCC’s newest premium diagnostic offering. In response to your peers’ requests to better understand how to effectively reduce effort in their service organizations, the Customer Effort Assessment helps you:

1.     Get a view into your customers‘ service journey by channel to understand customer channel behaviors and channel-hopping behaviors

2.     Deep dive into each channel to hear directly from customers what is causing them high effort

3.     Benchmark yourself against your peers (shortly other data cuts that you can use to track your progress over time).

The response to this offering has been overwhelming – more than 25 member organizations are participating and the first cohort has gotten the first crack at reviewing their custom report results.

Customer Effort Scores for Healthcare?

Max Ball    |    September 13, 2012

Having had two weeks of political conventions wash over me and listening to so much about the fate of Medicare, the economy, our debt and our healthcare, it was interesting to read Richard Alonzo-Zaldiver’s online article, “US Health Care System Wastes $750B a Year.”

I have worked in the contact center space most of my adult life and have spent much of my time at parties apologizing for the shoddy way so many companies treat their customers. But after reading Alonzo-Zaldiver’s article, I now feel much better about our industry.

Just this morning my wife told me about her recent doctor’s visit that generated two separate co-pay bills—one for a procedure done in the doctor’s office and the other for the “consultation” that she apparently had with the doctor prior to the procedure which seemed more like a quick chat at the time. Three phone calls in and she is no closer to a solution.

So much of what we are learning about customer experience and good customer service is being missed in spades in the healthcare world. For example, we know that customers get angry when they have to repeat information to an agent that they have already entered into an IVR. And the company is paying the agent for wasted time.

How measuring customer effort saved our service operations

How does a huge company like BT bounce back from a repuational crisis? BT's MD of customer service talks to MyCustomer.com about revolutionising service through customer effort scores. 

BT isn’t the first company that springs to mind when you think of excellent customer service case studies. In fact, the telecoms company has struggled to recover from a reputation of poor service and frustrated customers after a number of structural changes left many of its 12 million customers reeling in anger.

Warren Buckley, BT’s MD of customer service, doesn't shy away from this fact, and he explains that the problems stemmed from the need for the business to separate the network side of the business, which serves telecoms operators such as Sky and Talk Talk, from the customer-facing front side, totally changing the company’s established working practices as a result.

Extreme makeover: Three remarkable customer experience recoveries

Forrester's Harley Manning examines what measures Office Depot, Sprint and Fidelity Investments took to turn around their customer experience and reap financial rewards.

For those still in need of convincing of the correlation between customer experience and financial results, “Outside In: The Power of Putting Your Customers at the Center of Your Business” presents a compelling argument.

Co-authored by Forrester Research experts Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, the new book not only provides statistical evidence by comparing total returns from a portfolio of customer experience leaders to customer experience laggards, but also via case study examples demonstrating how brands cut costs and/or increased revenue through CEM programmes.

Boasting more than 80 case studies and examples from 15 industries in 16 countries, the evidence is overwhelming, with brands including the likes of Boeing, FedEx, JetBlue and Virgin Media all demonstrating improvements in fortune following customer experience overhauls.

Voice of the Customer: The six stages of setting up a successful programme

nAs Voice of the Customer programmes mature, expectations are rising rapidly. Teams tasked with building a Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme today, whether from scratch or as an evolution of an existing customer feedback project, are expected to deliver results that drive business change and generate significant ROI. The reason for this is clear; delivering an excellent customer experience is the most effective way for both B2C and B2B organisations to differentiate themselves from the competition – and a VoC programme is vital to improving the customer experience. 

Successful customer experience management (CEM) provides the insight required to increase revenue through reduced churn, improved cross-sell and the ability to better attract new customers. VoC programmes also help to reduce costs by improving processes and creating greater consistency. Finally, taking a customer-centric approach to every facet of the business drives cross-functional change and makes a real impact on organisational culture.

Customer loyalty programmes: Time to factor technology into the formula?

Loyalty programmes need more than emotional engagement and financial rewards, indicates a new report. 

The traditional formula for customer loyalty success is one part emotional engagement and one part transactional engagement. But a growing body of evidence is demonstrating that the chemistry of customer loyalty is volatile, and the precise balance of ingredients is in a constant state of flux.

Furthermore, a new report indicates that not only is the traditional balance shifting, but other new factors are increasingly playing a part in this complex concoction – something that brands seeking to capitalise on loyalty programmes should take note of.

The Customer Loyalty Report 2012, conducted by The Logic Group and Ipsos MORI, is an annual survey looking at the current customer loyalty landscape, focusing on understanding what motivates customers to be loyal and how best loyalty should be rewarded in today’s environment. The findings reflect the tough economic conditions consumers find themselves in, with Ipsos reporting that 47% of British adults claim their current financial situation is ‘weak’ and 26% expect it to be weaker in six months’ time.

Customer Effort Score (CES): A New Perspective on Customer Satisfaction

A while ago, our Chatham client delivery center in Ontario, Canada helped a major automotive company change the way it measures customer satisfaction. With CES (Customer Effort Score), we began looking at the “effort” that customers expended to get their issues resolved.

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: ARE WE MISSING SOMETHING?

Delighting customers has been the backbone of contact center management for many decades. Companies spend millions on front line training to ensure agents offer a delightful/pleasant interaction. As important as customer service training is, what rarely is measured is the effort that customers had to put in to get their issues solved (e.g., call backs, transfers, voice mails, dealer visits, etc.).

A recent study conducted by the Customer Contact Council, a division of the Corporate Executive Board, of over 75,000 customers found repeating messages in the results:

• Delighting customers does not build loyalty, reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does.
• Acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer experience, reduce service costs and decrease customer churn.

Customer satisfaction then is the result of an effortless resolution to their concerns. What happens along the way only adds/subtracts from the end result.

There Is No Single Best Measure of Your Customers

Single-question customer metrics have become very popular. Companies all have their favorites. Some go for the traditional Customer Satisfaction measure, others the now famous Net Promoter Score. The most recent addition to this panoply is the increasingly popular Customer Effort Score, which tracks the amount of time and effort that customers have to put into solving after-sales problems.

Each claims to be the one metric that managers need to measure, monitor, and act on, because it promises a better correlation with business performance than any other existing measure.

Reduce customer effort

Words such as “loyalty”, “engagement”, “community”, and “experience” describe a largely false relationship between customers and organizations.

“The IBM Institute for Business Value found that 60-65% of business leaders believe that consumers follow their brands on social media sites because they want to be a part of a community,” Patrick Spenner, wrote in Forbes in July 2012. “Only 25-30% of consumers agree. The top reason consumers follow a brand? To get discounts – not exactly ideal for a company’s bottom line.”

Are in-store technologies revolutionising customer experience?

Driven by smartphone growth, MyCustomer.com examines the emergence of in-store retail technologies and their ability to deliver a seamless shopping experience. 

The proliferation of smartphones is changing not just customers’ expectations of how brands communicate with them online, but also offline. Always connected, technologically sophisticated customers are demanding seamless integration with their online touchpoints whilst shopping in-store.

In a bid to keep customers engaged and stay ahead of the trends, traditional retailers are turning to new technologies such as near field communications, augmented reality, image recognition and interactive TV. Recent research from Motorola Solutions revealed that 51% of store retailers are directing budgets towards in-store technology to improve customer service whilst 22% are investing in technology to fend off competition.

UBank and NAB explore the online channel

Summary: How do two banks tackle social media? Surprisingly, the focus isn't necessarily on Twitter and Facebook, nor is it about customer service.
Tapping into the internet to help drive business to a bank might sound like a simple matter, but it's not just about setting up a Facebook page and it's not necessarily about customer satisfaction either.

Speaking at Bank Tech 2012 earlier this week, UBank's social media coordinator, Emma Tyler, and National Australia Bank's (NAB) general manager of digital services, Chris Smith, outlined how they were approaching social media use to help drive business.
UBank has a unique customer base: they're tech- and finance-savvy, and spend more time online than the average user. Recognising this, UBank made it a part of its online strategy to move beyond the use of Facebook and Twitter by creating a series of websites that aren't always directly related to its products, but are of interest to its customers.

Customer Experience: Reduce Customer Effort

Words such as "loyalty", "engagement", "community", and "experience" describe a largely false relationship between customers and organizations.
"The IBM Institute for Business Value found that 60-65% of business leaders believe that consumers follow their brands on social media sites because they want to be a part of a community," Patrick Spenner, wrote in Forbes in July 2012. "Only 25-30% of consumers agree. The top reason consumers follow a brand? To get discounts - not exactly ideal for a company's bottom line."

We have noticed in our research that many customers go to social media sites to complain. When they are really ticked off about an organization they use social media to broadcast that annoyance.

Most normal people don't want to be part of the Coca Cola or Pepsi communities. Organizations have abused words such as "community" and "loyalty" for a long time.

There's a need to get real.

Lives Made Much Easier (LiMME)

Lives Made Much Easier (LiMME) is a strategic customer journey improvement project at Barclays and in 2010, Raymond Pettitt (Managing Director) and Lorraine O’Neill (Coventry Head of Contact Centre) put forward Coventry as a proof of concept site to create an environment where cultural enablers and ways of working could be altered to make customers’ lives much easier. Called BLiMME (bringing LiMME to life), a key step was to undertake 300+ customer surveys and 350+ colleague panels, determining what held Barclays back from being ‘best in class’. Performance metrics, previously focused on hygiene factors, were changed; sales targets were removed and customer metrics such as net promoter score (NPS) introduced. A new tool was implemented to provide cross-channel visibility, preventing the need for questions to be repeated or data re-keyed. “This wasn’t just a tick-box exercise” “We gave people the tools to empower them to give a better service the customer." “We moved away from a target-driven environment”.

How to Electrify Your Customer Relationships

What does it take to build a powerful customer relationship? According to Bill Lee, author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset, most companies leave untold profits on the table because they assume they only way they can deepen their customer relationships is through the product or service they provide. (Customers will flock to a bank because its interest rates are better, the thinking goes, or because they get a free iPod when they open an account.) But that’s only half the story, says Lee – and it creates a shallow, what’s-in-it-for-me relationship.

Customer experience smackdown: Customer Effort Score vs NPS vs satisfaction

Posted By Natalie Brandweiner in Customer intelligence, Customer experience

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MyCustomer examines the Customer Effort Score as a measure of customer experience - and looks at how it shapes up next to Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction. 

Using recommendation or satisfaction-based techniques to measure customer loyalty is a well-established practice in the marketing world, and not without its controversies. Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), the first of such measurements, determines customer loyalty based on the question ‘Would you recommend the company to others?’ and hailed by Reichheld as the “single most reliable indicator” of company growth. It enjoyed a stint of popularity in the 1990s before becoming heavily criticised and moving over for another measurement.

Customer satisfaction measurement (CSAT) determines how an organisation meets the expectations of its customers based on satisfaction. Customers are asked a question based on how satisfied they are with the company following a transaction which is then rated from one (very dissatisfied) to five (very satisfied), although has also fallen under criticism, mostly for its lack of detail.

Beyond Net Promoter®: measure your emotional preference score

Author: Steven Walden, published on 20 Jun 2012

Classically firms are inward focusing asking questions such as how satisfied are our customers or how likely are they to recommend US. These are all great questions but they all suffer the same problem, they do not differentiate your company in terms of the market.

Think of it this way:

1. I can say I am very satisfied with your firm, but I can say pretty much the same thing about many other organisations as well
2. I can say I would highly recommend your firm, but I can say pretty much the same thing about many other organisations as well.

This is important for when customers consider using your services, brands or products they are always consciously or implicitly playing a game of compare and contrast. Your firm does not sit in isolation; it is always set in market context.

So what is a differentiating question, one that considers these market conditions?

What's Your Customer Effort (Score)?

There's been a lot of discussion or debate about Customer Effort Score (a metric developed by the Corporate Executive Board's Customer Contact Council), especially relative to Net Promoter Score, about whether it's an effective metric to use to measure the customer experience.


For those of you who don't know, Customer Effort Score (CES) is, in short, derived from one question that you'll add to your post-transactional survey(s) to assess the degree of effort that the customer had to exert in order to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, a product purchased/returned, or a question answered. (Many were first exposed to the concept behind CES in this HBR article, Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers.) The survey question goes roughly like this:

Debunking the Customer Effort Score

The Customer Effort Score has got a lot of airplay – claiming to be the only Customer Service Metric that you would need.

In this article Guy Fielding looks at these claims, and finds that although Customer Effort is a good supporting indicator, it cannot be used as the primary Customer Service Metric.

In summer 2010, when Dixon, Freeman and Toman published their HBR paper “Stop trying to delight your customers” they not only offered hard pressed customer service people a tantalising hint of a less demanding service standard.

What measurement is best? Net Promoter, CSAT, or Customer Effort?

Customer Effort Animated (by bluesky)

Customer Service Buzzwords to be Listening for in 2012

Customer Effort, Positive Discipline and Service Awareness are just some of the buzzwords that customer service managers are likely to hear about in 2012.

(Boonton, NJ, January 19, 2012) — The term buzzword has negative connotations for some — as if something that is a buzzword this season is likely to be passe next season. So we asked contributors to Customer Service Newsletter's annual "Looking Ahead" article to offer their best guess as to the ideas, concepts, strategies, and yes, buzzwords, that customer service managers are likely to hear more about in 2012 and beyond. Here's what they said:

Customer effort. John Goodman of TARP Worldwide suggests that we will be hearing more about "customer effort" as a metric applied to customer service. It refers to how much effort it takes for the customer to get what he needs or to have his issue resolved. Goodman warns, however, that if the customer effort metric is used to measure the call center, companies should take into account things like IVR systems and finding the right person, because this might add to the customer's effort before the customer service agent ever answers the phone.

Focus on reducing customer effort, not increasing customer satisfaction.

Stuart Corner
IT Industry - Strategy
Igor Sarenac, vice president, communications worldwide for outsourced call centre operator, Convergys contends that the industry, globally is moving away from measuring - and trying to increase - customer satisfaction as a key metric of customer service performance towards trying to reduce customer effort.

Convergys claims to be the largest operator of outsourced English language call centre services in the world. Sarenac said: "We have over 70,000 operators. We support all major industries but communications is the largest market segment accounting for 54 percent of our business."

He told iTWire: "We believe customer effort has the overarching reach: it has an impact on satisfaction, loyalty and the cost of doing business...All the analysis shows that customer effort is linked to customer satisfaction. It is a measure of how hard the customer has to work to engage with a company: in purchasing services and in using services and across all channels, and how this happens across the various channels."

Customer Effort Score| Blog Talk Radio

Episode 161 Rieva Lesonsky and Matt Dixon 01/06 by Barry J Moltz | Blog Talk Radio

Focus on minimising customer effort and get big returns

Author: Greg Muller on 1 February 2012

How many of you have said to yourself while waiting on a call for a service operator or struggling with an online purchase process, “Why I am persisting with this?” Did you opt-out or was the reason too great to persist with the struggle?

How many of you have walked past a cafe with a long queue for your morning coffee and kept on walking? If two in three prospective customers kept walking because they didn’t have the time to wait, would the potential returns justify a rethink to your staffing and shop design?

As business owners and managers, have you honestly spent the time to investigate just how many potential customers you’re missing out on due to the effort you put customers through?

Our frictionless way to collect user feedback and the unexpected impact it had

Written by Marcus Kuhn 

How do you measure how much your users like your product? This is one of the essential question that every founder needs to answer to make the right decisions - to move the product ahead.

In some lean startup related discussion I stumbled accross the idea of asking your users if they were sad if the used product would vanish. As the lean startup is all about validating assumptions based on data and turning them into "validated learnings" this simple way of measuring a user's attachment was an idea that spoke to me. I wanted this for connex.io but our designer Thierry convinced me that we had to adapt the idea for it to work in our context. And we did.

Don't Contain Callers…Help Them - CRM Magazine

Don't Contain Callers…Help Them - CRM Magazine

Satisfy customers first, then delight them

by Jeff Lash

If you want to be a bad product manager, hope that cool unexpected aspects of your product or service will make up for deficiencies in other areas. Sure, your product has some flaws, but it’s easier to add some neat features than fix the parts that are broken. Enough attention-grabbing items will draw attention away from the problem areas, and the positive feedback you get from the nice-to-haves will make people forget what’s missing.

If you want to be a good product manager, satisfy customers first before attempting to delight them. There is a lot of talk lately about how to “delight the customer,” and organizations are attempting to do this through exceptional customer service or unexpected product features. This likely driven by an attempt to generate buzz and goodwill by customers raving about these delights, often on social media. When done well and appropriately, the benefits of these delighting product aspects can truly differentiate an offering and an organization.

Satisfy, Don't Delight

By Dr. Frederick Van Bennekom
Summary. "Delight, don't just satisfy” has been the mantra in customer service circles for many years. Satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal was the underlying assumption. Now a research project by the Customer Contact Council of the Corporate Executive Board argues that exceeding expectations has minimal marginal benefit over just meeting expectations. In essence the authors argue that satisfaction drives loyalty more than the mysterious delight factors. This article examines the argument, and specifically looks at its shortcomings in how they establish the loyalty link.

The holy grail of long term company profitability has been knowing what drives loyal behavior on the part of our customers. What gets them coming back again and again? What drives them away? How do we identify the disloyal ones to win them back? Various researchers from Reichheld's Net Promoter research to Keiningham & Vavra, Improving Your Measurement of Customer Satisfaction, have argued we have to distinguish the attributes that satisfy from those that delight. A satisfied customer may buy again, but a delighted customer is far more likely to be loyal. That's been the argument.

Net Promoter Score vs. Customer Effort Score

ZANNA VAN DER AA, MIND THEM@ MINDTHEMNL


Around 2007/2008 I noticed that the Net Promoter Score (NPS) has now become a good hype. Virtually all organizations who took part in my research asked me: do you know the NPS score? Could you also can take in your research? It is now 2012 and the NPS management and Board level in many organizations seeped through. That in itself is good (and finally support for the customer at the highest level), but the NPS has not been superseded by the Customer Effort Score (CES)? In this blog an attempt to both metrics in perspective. 

Customer Effort Score is only one-sixth of a total service experience

By David Conway, Chief Strategy Officer, Nunwood

http://www.customerexperiencemagazine.org/Issue12/DavidConway.html

The July 2010 Harvard Business Review article ‘Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers’, introduced a new measure to the field of customer experience measurement - the Customer Effort Score (CES) and the last issue of Customer Experience Magazine, discussing the pros and cons of this measure, raised a lot of discussions.  

Its proponents claim it’s more predictive of future consumer behaviour than higher order measures such as CSAT and NPS.

They propose that focusing deliberately on it will “improve customer service, reduce customer service costs and decrease customer churn”. 

The promises attributed to this singular focus have resonated strongly across customer experience teams - there is no doubt effort is an interesting metric; it plays to the rapid results demands of our times, is straightforward to implement and elegantly simple in design.

However, like NPS before, it is the simplicity of the measure that has caused controversy. Few critics have problems with the measure per se. They struggle with a measure that excludes product, price, brand and the competitive environment being cited as the primary determinant of customer loyalty. 

Forget Net Promoter, try the Customer Effort Score

At a time when securing the long-term loyalty – and revenue – of your customers is a priority, new research shows that delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty, but reducing the effort required from them in order to get their problem solved, does.

Keith Pearce investigates…

• Few people will argue that the profile and behaviours of the average consumer have changed in the last 18 months.
• Recent ContactBabel research, commissioned by Genesys, shows that while service provision has not declined, customer complaints are up 34 per cent in the last year.
• Customers are just more ready to find fault and speak out about it.
• The natural response is for businesses to expend a lot of time, resource and money on enhancing service and trying to ‘delight’ the customer.

But does the benefit of ‘delighting’ customers build that elusive customer loyalty?

Is effort the new loyalty? (Marketing Week)

Customer service is a vital element for brand loyalty and part of this is making it as easy as possible for consumers to find answers to their questions. Collecting data from interactions can help smooth the process



“Loyalty is a very loaded term. Who are we loyal to? Friends and family. But not really companies,” warned BT’s customer experience futurologist Dr Nicola Millard at Marketing Week’s Customer Retention summit in September.

Expert's Angle: Call Center Metrics vs. Customer Experience Metrics: The Critical Difference

• OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
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Feb 02, 2012 (1)

By: Mary Murcott

Customer Experience. It's the latest buzz-phrase in customer service. Everyone wants CE in his or her title. It gives the executive influence, because it broadens the scope of what is controlled and measured. It is the company's neural-network node to customer loyalty and ultimately profitability. In other words, an update of the 1980's Service – Profit Chain:

Service + Experience → Loyalty + Word of Mouth → Profitability

So, if you have the new title “Customer Experience”, some new metrics are in order. Metrics that go beyond Net Promoter, First Contact Resolution, Service Level, or Service Level Consistency.

Customer Surveys & Net Promoter driving Your Customer Interactions

http://www.verintblog.com/index.php/tag/ken-bernhardt
Recently Oscar Alban hosted a webinar with Ken Bernhardt focused on customer surveys and net promoter scores. There were well over 250 attendees and a number of good questions resulting from this discussion. Below are three of those questions and answers for information.

How to reduce your Customer Effort Score

Written by Dave Tidwell. Posted in Anana Briefing Centre, Call Centre, Contact Centre, Customer Effort Score, Customer Services, Genesys Call Centre

  

The Customer Effort Score explained

Please see our earlier posts on the similar theme to the details of the formally published Customer Effort Score. This post serves to explore the Customer Effort Score from the view of a Customer Contact Centre Solutions provider; and to explain, more in laymans terms what the Customer Effort Score means, and how it may apply in our typical day to day experiences.  Better still, it provides direct examples of how to reduce your Customer Effort Score!

Customer Effort Score - HBR Article

Customer Effort outperforms Net Promoter and Customer Satisfaction scores – Harvard Business Review found

Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort - the work they must do to get their problem solved – does, a study conducted by Harvard Business Review found, and acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn.