Is it the Customer Service Score or the Customer Service Experience?

Posted by The Daniel Group
There is clearly growing interest in improving customer service.  You see it in the number of companies promoting their service.  You also see it in the number of surveys you get about most anything you buy.  But I recently began to wonder if there is more interest in chasing a metric than making significant strides to improve the customer service experience.  A few examples to illustrate my point follow:

Satisfy the customer OR NOT?

For years, companies focused their customer service on one goal: satisfy the customer. When the customer is happy, they'll continue to purchase your products and services, right? Well, maybe not.

As research shows, customer loyalty is not built by pleasing your customers. Rather, loyalty increases when companies reduce the amount of effort it takes for customers to do business with them. Fab.com,the the fastest growing commerce site in the world proved this concept by implementing changes that effective reduced the amount of effort it takes to get their questions answered.

5 Simple Strategies to Reduce Customer Effort

Idit Aloni-Halfon, Enterprise Portfolio Marketing Manager

We already know that the secret for organizations to increase customer loyalty is by improving the customer experience by focusing on the way customers feel. A key factor in doing so is reducing the amount of effort required by customers to receive the service they expect. Reduced customer effort will lead to improved customer experience and increased customer loyalty, and, as a result, to a higher ROI. 

How can this be achieved? Take a look at our five strategies.

Customer Effort Score™ and NPS: Gangnam Style Metrics?

By: Randy Brandt

Back in November, 2008 the Corporate Executive Board proclaimed the Customer Effort Score™ or CES to be “the best measure of customer loyalty.”   CES is derived from a question asked of customers who have recently contacted a company’s call center or experienced some other specific transaction with that company.  “How much effort did you personally have to put forth in order to handle your request?” the customer is asked, and his/her answer furnishes the basis of the CES score.

Five years later, the buzz around CES is starting to build.

Ease the customer down the aisle

New research looks at how consumers rate nine grocery retailers in terms of ‘effort to shop’ and finds that the easier the experience, the more likely customers will remain loyal.

The more effort a customer has to put into a dealing with a brand, the less likely they are to be a loyal customer, according to new research. Customers reporting ’low effort experiences’ are more likely to go out of their way to keep using a brand.

Research agency BDRC Continental generated a Customer Effort Score for nine retailers by asking 1,000 customers to rate the ‘effort’ of an experience on a five point scale, where one equals very low effort and five equals very high effort.

Customer effort? Help or hype?

Customer Effort: Help or hype? from BT Let's Talk

Avaya Customer Effort Impact Study Reveals the Cost of Inconvenience

• Customer perceptions shaped by the amount of effort required to obtain service
• Repeated, high effort experiences are more damaging to brand and revenue growth than good experiences are helpful
• 66 percent of customers say they are likely to leave a company after high effort experience

Santa Clara, CA — Avaya today announced the results of a Customer Effort Impact survey that highlights how the amount of work a customer exerts to obtain service affects business priorities of revenue and market growth, brand loyalty and operational margins. The results reinforce the value of a customer experience characterized by a holistic, low-effort, personalized approach to fulfill customers’ needs.

Customer needs and company objectives often appear to be at odds when it comes to the customer experience.  Consumers seek excellent service across all divisions of the company; companies look for revenue and market growth while controlling costs and increasing efficiency. To manage this dichotomy, companies need to define efficiency from the customer’s point of view, simplify the effort required and optimize each interaction for an engaged, long-term relationship that multiplies customer lifetime value.

Myth busted: Why content isn't king

In our rich multimedia world where content is abundant, the marketing industry so often says, content is king. After all, great content is needed to capture and engage audiences. Big bold creative concepts with integrated campaigns are exciting and sexy. The internet has made the circulation and delivery of content so cheap that everyone is now a publisher. The ability to find appropriate content through search engines, social networks and content curators gives consumers valuable information and entertainment. What’s more consumers expect content at a very low cost or even free. Given the abundance of content, the real demand is for high quality content.

Customer effort score: The truth about the controversial loyalty tool

MyCustomer.com caught up with Professor Moira Clark from Henley Business School and BT's Dr Nicola Millard to discuss customer effort score and asked is it help or hype?

Customer effort score may be the new kid on the block but just like other loyalty measurement tools such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction score (CSAT), it sharply divides opinion.

​Is Customer Effort an appropriate measure?

Is Customer Effort an appropriate measure to consider as a customer metric for businesses that are committed to developing a customer-centric organisation? Does it deliver financial benefits to those that invest in it?

The answer to both questions is yes; but only once its role as a performance measurement tool is understood in the context of other key customer experience measures.

http://www.gfk.com/uk/documents/thought-pieces/customer-effort.pdf

Customer experience questionnaires: What's the secret sauce for super surveys?

Industry experts outline what to ask customers in your survey and how to encourage engagement.  

As more businesses are joining the trend to redefine themselves as customer-experience driven, understanding customers and what satisfies them has become crucial for success. Customer feedback surveys, thought to retain customers and drive revenue, continue to be used as the main tool to measure experience. Is there any better way of gaining insight into how your customers feel about your brand, products and services than by directly asking them?

Measuring Social Media ROI - Econometrics from bla_admin

So you've decided to improve your customer experience - now what?!

Harley Manning outlines how brands can approach customer experience as a business discipline. Many a business has reached the crossroads of the customer experience – that moment when it has been decided that the organisation must improve the experience, but there is little idea where to go next. And as more brands realise the correlation between customer experience and financial results, so more of them will find themselves with the same quandary.

 Harley Manning, a vice president and research director at Forrester Research, and co-author of “Outside In: The Power of Putting Your Customers at the Center of Your Business”, believes that businesses needn’t be so confused. And he suggests the following steps. 

The trouble with magic metrics

Executives like the idea of using a single magic metric to evaluate customer service because it’s so simple. “Do well at this,” the thinking goes, “and you’re doing well.”

Unfortunately, the real magic happens when you start peeling back the layers of your data to find out what’s really going on. If you look carefully at so-called single score metrics like the Net Promoter System, you’ll realize the score is just a starting point for evaluation. It’s the underlying analysis and continuous drive to improve that’s really important.

The hidden key to reducing customer churn in Insurance? Reduce your customers' effort

How setting up a Customer Effort Index can radically increase Top-Line Revenue

We've all experienced one of the greatest paradoxes in the insurance industry – encouraging customers to be disloyal. Whether it’s offering an existing customer much higher renewal levels while dramatically reducing offers to others to encourage them to leave their existing supplier, or simply not having the appropriate channels by which to enable a customer to communicate with customer service.

Companies must radically re-think the rationale for customer service spend – it's not about reducing your customer service costs, it’s about stopping and not encouraging customer churn, and having a positive impact on your top-line revenue.

THREE WAYS TO REDUCE CUSTOMER EFFORT IN THE CONTACT CENTre

Customer effort reduction programs can have a dramatic impact on the customer experience your contact center delivers as well as on your company’s bottom line. 3-5% of your center’s call volume can be avoided with the help of a customer effort initiative, while handling time can be cut down by 4-6%. And in the contact center every second saved means a better customer experience, lower overhead costs and better ROI for your customer effort reduction program.

Here are three ways contact centers can work to reduce customer effort:

Eliminate Callbacks and Restarts - A Sure Fire Way to Lower Customer Effort

Customer Effort Score (CES) is the new hot metric for customer service. (CES) has been widely discussed since the HBR Article, Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers (July, 2010), where Customer Effort Score was touted as being a better predictor of customer loyalty than Net Promoter Score or First Contact Resolution. While CES is an important metric and arguably the best metric to focus your service operation, there is no such thing as a “magic metric”. Getting results from implementing CES depends on execution and focus.

Not another measure – Customer Effort Score – good but no Cigar

For some firms Customer Effort Score (CES) may appear as the next Net Promoter Score. The compelling proposition is that firms should not obsess so much about ‘delighting’ customers as get the basics right! Make it easy or effortless for them. This is all well and good, but as with most things in life the law of ‘it depends’ applies. It depends on what you are selling, if it’s a theme park, focusing on the amount of effort customers expend is not really going to make for a great customer experience although the reverse may well be true if you are a poor call centre.