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.

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.