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.
I’ve had the privilege of reviewing these first few reports and working with several of the companies to interpret their findings. Their feedback has been constructive and positive – we’ve made changes to survey questions and presentation of the results, with some members calling the results ‘insightful’ and ‘actionable.’
Take the example of two companies – it’s a bit of a tale of two cities if you will. Both took the Customer Effort Assessment, but came to some very different insights:
Company A, a mid-sized B2B organization, wanted to know how to get to the next level of customer experience improvement. They felt like they had made some strides forward, but were hitting a plateau. Their data revealed that they had a low-effort experience for customers in their phone channel – no surprise given their focus on coaching. However, they had a significant number of customers who tried to self-serve on the web first – but who had high effort interactions, often having to channel hop to get resolution. In fact, most customers either could not find what they were looking for online or did not clearly understand the solution once they found it.
Their big takaway? Instead of spending another dollar on improvement to an already solid phone experience, they began to think about reallocating resourcing to consumability of FAQs and online guidance to solutions.
Company B, a large B2C organization, had a lot of different channels. They wanted to be able to prioritize improvement among their channels because they simply did not have the resources to tackle everything at once. So, while they found opportunity areas across several channels, phone channel was a clear priority due to its high volume. And it turned out there were some quick wins to be had – some technical issues in the IVR and a lack of customer confidence in reps.
So their big takeaways? Fix their technical glitches and then focus on coaching frontline reps to increase the customer’s sense of confidence in the rep’s answer to reduce callbacks.
Just two examples, but you get the idea here. We just held a meeting for nearly 20 folks in the initial Customer Effort Assessment cohort – and heard both about great initiatives companies are taking to reduce effort to ways to continue to evolve the customer effort assessment. For example, we’ll soon start segmenting data by issue type to see any trends in customer behavior or effort levels. We’ll also be rolling out a cloud-based dashboard in Q1 of 2013 so that you can cut your data and track your success over time. Down the road, we got great ideas from the cohort on implementation tools and playbooks, cohort networking opportunities, benchmarking cuts, and other ways to help you on your effort journey.
Want to be part of this cohort? Just let us know.
As Pete said last week, we are leaving the safe harbor of known customer effort reduction tactics and embarking on a journey across the open seas towards our shared destination – a true low-effort service organization that works seamlessly together to enable low-effort experiences for every customer. We’re so excited to be on this journey with you – learning from you and helping by providing you with a north star for guidance. Look for more to come from us, and share with us your thoughts on the next generation of ways to reduction customer effort.
Posted on 30 October 12 by Lara Ponomareff
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