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?
A 2010 study published by Harvard Business Review1 brings this point to light really well. A survey of approximately 75,000 B2B and B2C customers was conducted over a three year period for customers across who interacted with an organisation within the contact centre environment or self-service channels. The killer insight for me was that trying to delight a customer doesn’t build loyalty. Rather, reducing the effort a customer needs to put in to solve their problem (or complete their task), did.

A second insight from the study takes me back to my SmartCompany blog from last February, Beyond the Net Promoter Score. In that blog I challenged you all to look beyond scores such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) to measure customer loyalty, their propensity to recommend and buy from you on an ongoing basis. The study found that measuring customer effort instead delivers a much stronger predictor of re-purchase, over NPS and CSAT.

This is also consistent with Global Reviews' online behavioural data where we observe strong correlations between website usability, task satisfaction and a customer's propensity to recommend the website.

Here are a few key takeaways:

• Carefully monitor and measure the effort a customer has to go through across your most important interactions. 
• Evaluate each interaction channel separately, and then together for when customers want to do business with you cross-channels. 
• Try and get access to what represents best practice. Much of the hard work has been done and tested. If you’re finding it difficult, think back on your recent great experiences and understand what was good. Try to replicate it. 
• Don’t fix and forget. Keep a close eye on each channel, put in place metrics for your team and website and optimise. I promise you, it will be worth it. 

One final thing, keep asking yourself the question, “Am I easy to do business with?” If you think you are, are not sure or think your experience stinks, you now know what you need to do.

Greg Muller is the Chief Executive Officer of international research and insights firm, Global Reviews. Global Reviews is a world leading research firm which measures the experience major brands offer their customers and how easy it is to buy from them. Greg is a highly regarded business leader and entrepreneur who, for over 14 years, has been a pioneer in digital services and online customer experience. He advises boards and senior management teams in the areas of digital strategy, customer engagement, business enablement, governance and technology convergence.