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."


"When a customer comes in on one channel and their issue is not resolved they switch channels and eventually end up with a live operator. And the more channels they use the more it costs the company."

He said companies that strove to increase customer satisfaction spent money doing so, but strategies to reduce customer effort could actually save costs, and increase customer satisfaction. "If you ensure that you address the client problem with the first contact you reduce the amount of interaction and the customer effort required, and that immediately drives down the cost and increases customer satisfaction."

"[For example] if a customer starts off on the web site and then goes to chat and then to live service to resolve their issue, they may be satisfied but the effort is considerable. And you cannot directly tie satisfaction to cost but you can know the cost per channel and if they have to go through three channels you know the cost.