Philosophers have been discussing for centuries whether man is naturally good, as Rousseau thought, or, on the contrary, a wolf to other men, as Hobbes argued.
Customer Experience consultants have little to say about this age-old debate, but what we are convinced of is that men (and women) are by nature lazy.
Human beings, customers, are tremendously lazy by nature, or if you want to put it positively, we have more interesting things to do than make the effort to contract or make use of the products and services we buy.
Therefore, for all companies that want to be leaders in Customer Experience and Sales, including customer effort indicators in their scorecard must be a priority.
We call customer effort the non-monetary cost of the transaction. A customer makes a significant effort when he or she has to spend time or energy to engage or resolve a problem with us. Customer effort can also be being worried or feeling insecure.
Let’s look at some examples of customer effort:
- Driving our car to a hypermarket that is far from our residence to do our monthly shopping.
- Queuing in a shop.
- Call a telephone operator’s customer service and talk for a few minutes with a bot to explain our problem.
- Wait for a web page to finish loading.
- Waiting for several months to receive a car I ordered.
- Enter my card details on an unknown website.
To measure customer effort we can use the Customer Effort Score (CES), a metric that measures the ease with which customers can perform desirable actions in their interactions with a company. The objective of the CES is to identify friction points in the Customer Experience to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty in the long term.
This indicator is usually calculated through surveys where clients are asked how much effort they had to invest to achieve their goal, using a scale (e.g. 1 to 5 or 1 to 7) where the lower value represents less effort and the higher value more effort. The typical question might be: “On a scale of 1 to 5, how much effort did you have to put in to solve your problem?
ESC management involves several stages. First, it is crucial to collect data effectively, ensuring that surveys are brief, timely and targeted to specific experiences. Next, we must analyse this data to identify trends, recurring problems and opportunities for improvement. This may involve using analytical tools and artificial intelligence to segment the data and obtain detailed insights.
Once friction points have been identified, companies should implement changes aimed at reducing customer effort. This may include streamlining processes, improving the user interface on digital platforms, training customer service staff, simplifying registration and payment processes, automating certain services, or offering customers extensive self-service options.
Finally, it is important to continuously monitor the impact of these improvements on CES and adjust strategies as necessary. Effective customer effort management not only improves satisfaction and loyalty, but can also lead to higher customer lifetime value and competitive differentiation in the marketplace.
In addition to knowing the Customer Effort Score at each of the customer’s moments of truth, the company can complete the diagnosis by conducting qualitative studies with customers, using techniques such as in-depth interviews and focus groups.
Finally, a good strategy is to make each department responsible for the customer effort. For example, if customers call the contact centre many times because they do not understand the invoices, that cost should be charged to the billing department, not the customer service department, or if the digital channel generates more incidents in the installation of the product than the face-to-face channel, the customer service costs should not be charged to the channels by sales volume, but by volume of incidents.
The CES indicator gives us a lot of valid information and is complementary to other indicators such as the NPS which are, by their very nature, more holistic in nature.If you are considering implementing a customer effort measurement system in your company, we would be happy to have a conversation with you and help you make it a success.
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