Tag Archives: customer experience

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Customer Effort – Level 2: Customer Service

As I mentioned in my last post Customer Effort, the notion of making things easy for your customer, begins while the customer is still a prospect.

Most of what you’ll read around Customer Effort, and what I want to take a look at today, has to do specifically with customer service…whether that be via the web in a more self service approach or via a call center.

I don’t want to argue the relative merits of Customer Effort score just yet. While it is one of several measurements that can best be used in combination to make some guesses at customer loyalty it is also a risky measurement because it can refer to a specific instance in time rather than an overall experience.

It is also important to remember that customer effort is really applied differently in different industries.

Take a transactional service oriented business like banking, insurance, or utilities. In this case I want my provider to be nearly invisible. I want ANY interaction to be virtually effortless. My expectations for invisibility are quite high.

But now think about purchasing a configured item like a computer, cell phone service, or an automobile. In these instances I expect that my interactions may have a little more substance to them because my requests may start to run in a slightly more personalized vein. I still want the provider to know what I have but I may not have the same high set of expectations when it comes to them anticipating my need.

That being said I think there are several characteristics of any organization that set them up for success when it comes to customer effort.

1. They know me
When I log in to my account on your website, or provide my customer ID to your call center agent, I anticipate that I have just provided all the information you need to quickly call up everything there is to know about my interactions with you.  I should NEVER have to provide more information and I should ABSOLUTELY NEVER have to provide repeat information.

United Airlines is struggling at the moment trying to converge two web systems since their merger with Continental. When you log in to your frequent flyer account it can show you all your currently active reservations but you have to log in AGAIN to view the details of any of them. This is an epic failure.

Once you have my customer ID don’t ask me for my address, my phone number, or the model number of the product I’ve purchased from you unless you’re trying to confirm that I am who I say I am…even then it’s a dicey thing to ask.

2. Front End People are Empowered
I believe that the worst effort experience I have had in recent days came at the hands of AT&T. We were trying to combine my “business” cell phone account with the rest of my families “personal” account.

  • The rep in the store had to get a manager
  • The manager had to call a regional manager
  • The regional manager had to call a different kind of regional manager
  • Regional manager 2 sent it back to the store manager
  • …who had to call yet another type of regional manager

In all it took more than two and a half hours…and the bill still wasn’t right for the next two months.

The problem here was that the front end folks were not empowered to solve the problem. Don’t make your front end people call routers. The more times I have to be switched to another department, manager, or agent the lower you score on customer effort. Give the front end people the authority to think independently and solve the customer issue in one stop.

3. Information is persistent
This really should probably be the first one because it fuels the other two. I list it third because it is more system than process based and thus potentially the easiest to fix.

You can’t empower people to help me if they don’t know me and they can’t know me if they don’t have all the info at their fingertips. Your customers have multiple connections to you, web site, social media, call center, billing…each of those departments capturing information all the time. If you want to know me and empower people to serve me they have to have ALL that info.

How well do you know your customers? How empowered are your people when it comes to creatively serving your customers? Do they have the info they need?

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Customer Effort – A Basic Guide

Over the last decade or so three themes have held sway over the customer experience landscape.

Customer Delight is perhaps the most commonly known. The notion of finding way to provide unexpected delight for customers.

The notion of Net Promoter and Net Promoter Score isn’t far behind. We’ve all been asked how likely it is that we will recommend a product, or service, company to a friend.

The new kid on the block though is the idea of Customer Effort. If you do a Google search on Customer Effort you’ll find a lot of interesting debate. Go ahead, we’ll wait for you.

Now, if you did that what you most likely found is a lot of articles about Customer Effort and Customer Effort Score as they relate to customer service and loyalty. Make no mistake, loyal, repeat customers are what we’re all after and at the end of this series I’ll introduce some different thinking on loyalty, but I think much of what Google turns up on Customer Effort falls short of the mark.

Customer Effort begins as a set of expectations. The customer’s expectations, not yours. You may create a customer service department that is seamless and effortless for customers and that may gain you nothing because it is what they expect all along.

Being as this is intended as a basic guide allow me to suggest several guidelines for applying the concept of customer effort.

1. Effort begins before the customer is a customer.
As I mentioned above most articles seem to focus on customer effort as a measure of customer service, but what good does it do you to make customer service effortless if a customer can’t find you to buy from you in the first place?

In an overall customer effort strategy you should look first to see how easy it is for a potential customer to find you, learn about your product or service, learn what makes you different, and decide to buy from you. I know this sounds like marketing 101 but you’d be surprised how often you can go to a web site…the first place MANY potential customers go to learn about products and services…and learn less than what you need to know to make an informed buying decision.

This piece of the customer effort pie is crucial because it is where the customer begins to establish their expectations about you and your offering.

2. Don’t overlook the FAQ
How often do you go to the web to find out something about a feature of a product, or do some troubleshooting, or learn how others use it only to discover that the best answers come from user groups, bulletin boards, or Yahoo answers?

If the company that sold me the product doesn’t appear in the first three search results I start to wonder how well they know their customers. Just the fact that many of us go to Google before going to a manufacturers or sellers web site speaks volumes to how we perceive their desire to solve our quandaries.

If you want to up the ante on customer effort you should be perusing those bulletin boards, user groups, and yes, even Yahoo answers. Take what you find there and update the FAQ on your own site. The more I know you as the provider of info the easier it is to me to come to you for answers.

Don’t make me search, make we want to come ask you.

3. Not all effortless service is good service
I once had an IT guy ask for some marketing advice on a presentation he was going to give about “significant wins” for the department in the previous quarter. The “wins” were all about performance gains, down time, information access…good techy stuff. I starred at him blankly for a moment then asked, “So where are the wins?”

Everything he had presented as a “win” was something the rest of the organization expected as a matter of course. It would have been the equivalent of Ford or Chevy coming out and saying they had a significant “win” with their new models because the mirrors don’t fly off the side of the car when you go over 60 mph any more?!?

What they had surmised was a win was them barely coming up to general expectations, expectations of which they should have been deeply aware.

Remember that effort starts with expectations. What you think is something easy to take care of your customers may think is something they should have never had to bother with in the first place.

Customer Effort IS crucial when it comes to customer service but it starts well before any service call. Make sure your customers have an easy time dealing with you from the time they first hear your name, through the time they buy, and when they finally find themselves in need of additional service you’ll have set expectations correctly.

Then all you need do is deliver.

What do you think of when you hear the term Customer Effort? What types of conversations might be going on inside your organization around CE score?

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What is Your Customer’s Experience? Take 2.5

The Hotel where I have found myself residing since Monday here in Newcastle, Australia in equipt with what I refer to as the “room power off” feature. If you’ve never experienced it before it is a slotted light switch just inside the door. When you enter the room you insert your card key into the slot and this turns the power on to the room. When you leave you take your key with you, obviously, and the room powers off.

A nice energy saving feature to be sure. Except…

When you power off the room you power off the clock radio. When you power off the clock radio you reset the clock. When you power the room on upon your return the clock radio informatively tells you it is 12:00…12:00…12:00. Nice power saving feature but a hassle to have to reset the clock every time I come in the room.

Lame.

This trip is one of several I have currently booked with United Airlines. When I go to the United web site and log in I am presetned with a list of all my current reservations. I can easily click on the VIEW button next to any of them to see the detailed itinerary. And then…it asks me to log in again.

Lame.

We were wending our way down restaurant row in Newcastle the other night looking for a dining adventure. We found ourselvs attracted to a particular place based on the menu posted out near the sidewalk. As we made our way to the counter where we anticipated placing an order we discoevered that the ONLY menu available was the one posted out by the sidewalk. There was no way, inside the store, to know what was available to eat.

Lame.

Great that you a want to save me money on my room by saving power costs but ridiculous that I have to reset the clock everytime I come in the room

Great that you want to protect my information but ridiculous that you make me log in after you have already shown you know who I am.

Great that you entice me with the menu but ridiculous that you set up your establishment like a drive through without a microphone.

I’ve been working on a paper on customer experience of late which, frustratingly, has put me in a position of looking at the world through customer experience tinted glasses. In the next wouple posts I’ll be looking at the concepts of customer effort and customer delight.  But in the mean time…

What other examples do you have of poor customer experience? 

The real  irony behind all this is that WordPress failed me no less than 5 times in trying to post this…post. If I hadn’t had a series of good experiences with WordPress THIS experience would have really set me off.