The Customer Effort Score explained

Please see our earlier posts on the similar theme to the details of the formally published Customer Effort Score. This post serves to explore the Customer Effort Score from the view of a Customer Contact Centre Solutions provider; and to explain, more in laymans terms what the Customer Effort Score means, and how it may apply in our typical day to day experiences.  Better still, it provides direct examples of how to reduce your Customer Effort Score!

The bottom line of Customer Effort Scoring is to “Make it Easy” .  What is it?  Anything of course! Any interaction?  Any attempt of your customer to engage with you should be EASY in any channel, or any media, say, the Web with self-service or by making a phone call into customer services.  Both experiences need to be easy to do, and get the customer to the right information at the right time without effort.  Customer Effort Score philosophy strongly suggests (and has the statistics to prove it) that the easier you make your customers effort (the lower the score) the less likely they are to be disloyal (move or swap their buying power to your competitor).  These are some of the key and rather sobering metrics discovered by the Harvard Business Review team in their study;

• 56% of people report having to re-explain an issue erodes their loyalty
• 57% of people report having to switch from the web to the phone as eroding their loyalty
• 59% of people report having to expend moderate to high effort to resolve an issue erodes their loyalty
• 59% of people report being transferred during interactions with the Call Centre as eroding their loyalty
• 62% of people report having to repeatedly contact the company concerned to resolve an issue as eroding their loyalty

Even though I integrate and sell solutions to deal with these key issues I still personally go through at least 1 or 2 of the above findings every time I contact or attempt to contact a supplier to my family.  Loyalty to me is my stickiness to the organization I have a relationship with.  If the relationship is EASY and I don’t have to jump through hoops to do anything ‘difficult or requiring effort’ then of course, I’m far less likely to migrate my allegiance to someone elses product or service.

Customer Effort Score is a simple scale of 1 through 5 with 1 representing lowest effort and 5 representing highest effort.  The lower the measured Customer Effort (as a score) the less likely the customer is to break their loyalty to your product or brand.

The Harvard Business Review team found 5 key drivers to reducing Customer Effort.  I will paraphrase and simplify them for you next.

1. Don’t just focus on immediate call resolution or issue but put some time into dealing with the next one before it happens.The biggest cause of excessive customer effort is any requirement of the caller to call back.  Companies have learned to convince themselves that solid metrics in First Call Resolution (FCR) is the key.  It is not.  The aim to reduce the customer effort is to stop them having to phone back at all; especially if it has any bearing to the reasons that they are calling you now!  22% of repeat calls into the contact centre are directly related to the issues that prompted the original interaction; even if the company concerned closed the case as resolved the first time around.
2. Train and allow your Customer Service Represenative to deal with the emotional side of customer contacts.24% of repeat calls in the HBR study showed a clear emotional disconnect between customers and the Customer Service Representative. In other words, 1 in every 4 callers completes the planned transaction UNHAPPY, yet the Customer Service Representative closes the case as ‘resolved’.  With basic training and instruction anyone can be taught to eliminate this disconnect and reduce repeat calls
3. Get rid of channel switchingHave you ever heard your call centre management team saying something along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get more of our customers to do this on the website instead of phoning us?”  I must have heard this hundreds of times from our customers when we are deploying Interative Voice Response at the ‘front-door’ or working hard on process engineering in the workflow and processes in the call centre.  I’m still astounded that our clients look at us in a bemused fashion to lend them some support with the question.  They are actually suggesting that their own customers are stupid!  I’m really happy to see that the Customer Effort Score article says it plain and simply; 57% of inbound calls came from your customers who have ALREADY BEEN ON THE WEBSITE!!  Cross Channel Interaction Management is NOT difficult, and it is not something that requires huge spending on technology or upgrades to make it happen.  Investing in a profusion of self-service channels is not necessarily the answer either!  Interactive Voice Response, Websites, e-mail, web-chat, online support communities like Forums, social media such as Facebook and Twitter.  I bet you are lighting them all up already; with an assumption that all of these as a whole will reduce the telephony traffic into the call centre.  They won’t!  Why?  Your technically unsophisticated customers when left to their own devices may try out all these channels; expend a lot of energy, become frustrated, bounce between a couple of the channels (without continuity) and then in despair pick up the phone in the end.  One of the things I really admire in the Genesys Cross Channel Communications capability; married with the Conversation Manager capability that unifies, concentrates and exposes Interactions with your customers across channels.  That way, if your customer gets half way through a transaction in self-service, but then picks up the phone you can immediately suggest meaningful ways of continuing the activity where it was left of.  It is subtle; but it is POWERFUL.  Beware your customers vent their frustration or ‘high-effort’ on social media channels! (See my earlier thoughts on the real impact of negative social sentiment in other posts for details)
4. Use surveys and feedback from really unhappy customers and focus on reducing effort.Do not focus on satisfaction (or lack thereof) surveys that simply try and determine “how nice the CSR was?”, or “Did we serve you well? Please score from 1 to 5 how we performed”…  Find out what the effort score was!  Why was it hard for this customer?  Are their issues service or product related, or are they related to the effort (the hoops they need to jump through) to get something done.  Also, you can pro-actively look to find customers that are ‘struggling’.  A simple example is “If you see a customer on your web site, that has clicked on more than 5 pages, or has spent more than 90 seconds in a group of pages that are linked by theme (say, a knowledge base or FAQ) then reach out to them.  Offer a web-chat or a co-browse and help them.  It is obvious that they are looking for something and not finding it.  In retail environments, good sales reps can spot a customer that is not ‘just browsing’ from 200 yards away; and they time very carefully their initial approach to lend assistance.  Just because the web-site is a self-service channel it doesn’t mean it cannot be partially or wholly supported with agents or Customer Service Representatives.  There is evidence in the HBR original article that effective use of co-browse and web-chat from the contact centre reduced calls by 8%
5. Allow and enable your front office to reduce the customers effortStop valuing the Customer Service Representative Average Call Handling Time (ACHT)! (One example of many ways that metrics and performance management make the CSR do a BAD job!).  Do not value speed over quality.  Statistics and Analytics are key in driving operational awareness of what is happening in the contact centre; but should not be used as weapons to drive for efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.  Targetting and measuring performance of CSR’s in 10ths of seconds is great for a spreadsheet exercise; but challenging them, paying them, incenting them, pressuring them to achieve FIRST CALL RESOLUTION in the SHORTEST TIME is self-defeating.  What is a better productivity measure?  How many customers you are losing? Or how many calls you are dealing with in under 93 seconds?  HBR strongly suggests that the call centre REMOVE the productivity “Governors” that get in the way or contradict making your customers experience easier!  An unnamed Australian Telecommunications network was brave enough to remove ALL productivity metrics from its front-office performance scorecards.  Average Call Handling Time did increase, marginally, but repeat calls into the Call Centre reduced by 58%.  Today, that company evaluates its Customer Service Representatives on the basis of very short, and person to person interviews with the customer; asking them directly whether or not the service they received met their needs.   Some companies take this recommendation to high levels; for example, Nedbank in South Africa offered its clients an “AskOnce” promise; guaranteeing that the Customer Service Representative who picks up the phone will OWN that customers issue from start to finish.  I don’t know about you but I like the sound of that as a consumer! 

My personal summary is quite simple really.  Make it easy.  If things are easy to do then they will have a positive impact.  Also, instead of trying to thing about the ‘corporate or enterprise’ Customer Interaction Management strategy; think about yourself.  What do you like and dislike in your daily life about dealing with the companies that supply goods and services to you?  Learn from what you like, and don’t make the same mistakes by adopting the same strategies against the things you don’t like!  For me, looking at Customer Effort Score is a Game Changer, and as a strategy for Contact Centre and Customer Engagement measurement it will have a wide and very relevant adoption in keeping with Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scoring (NPS).  I think CES, the Customer Effort Score is here to stay.  One thing for sure, Anana embraces the philosophy head-on and it forms a large element of all our contact centre solution engagements.  We like it; it makes sense, and we believe in it.  The really cool thing that resonates; is that the paradigm of CES is directly aligned with the capabilities and features of the Genesys Call Centre Solution.  We have put a lot of effort into exposing the reduction in CES by showing how Genesys can help achieve these aims in our Briefing Centre.  If you want to see it in action at any time then just let me know; we’d be delighted to show you how!

I recent attended the UK Experience Summit in London.  The event was hosted and delivered by the Genesys Telecommunications EMEA team and a key line in the theme of the presentations and discussions was a new momentum to a new way of measuring your call centre performance.

Traditionally call centres have derived feedback or insights into their operational performance based on ;

• CSAT – Customer Satisfaction – a physical measurement, often in a post-experience survey of a caller (automated or manually conducted)
  or
• NPS – Net Promoter Score – a physical measurement that solicits from the caller or end-user a metric that describes to what extent they would ‘promote’ or ‘influence’ their peer group to buy or engage in activities with the product or service being scored

Both of these metrics received wide approval and adoption rates across the call centre and customer service lines of business.  A recent detailed study completed by the Harvard Business Review [HBR] (link) titled “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers”* strongly challenged the assumption that companies must go “above and beyond in their customer service activities” – effectively suggesting that these efforts make little to no difference! Their study of more than 75,000 people found that what they consumer really wanted is for a “Simple, Quick and Easy solution” to their enquiry or problem!

In summary; HBR argue that the amount of EFFORT that a consumer has to expend to interact and engage with his or her supplier is the key to determining their liability to remain loyal to that company.  It is uncanncy, for me, as a so called ‘expert’ in the industry now with over 24 years in it that I should already have known this as a fact.  What I think is true is that I felt it.  Yes, I supply these solutions, and spent years as a market/technology ‘evangelist’ for the customer experience.  Yet, my own personal interactions with my suppliers (Banks, Utilities, Airlines, Telephone Company etc) has always been characterised by a LOT of effort.

The things that really annoy me are having to dig in paperwork to find or retrieve a complex account number so I could even phone the company and deal with the issue.  Then, having phoned in to be asked for other ‘information’ like a challenge password, or details of an address 3 moves ago (which I have long since forgotten)…..leaving me annoyed and actually avoiding reaching out to deal with the issue because I know it will require a lot of effort on my part to get the problem solved.

So, as an end user of call centre technology as a ‘customer’ I can readily sympathise with the sentiment and angle that HBR have expressed.  I feel rather stupid though as an industry expert for not having recognised this approach much earlier on.  For now, I’m keen to explore its impact with our call centre customers. We spent about 80% of our time here at Anana discussing these very topics; and I’m excited to begin this new dialogue on “CUSTOMER EFFORT SCORING” with our clients.  I know it will open a very engaged dialogue.

I think the folks at Genesys Telecommunications Labs are absolutely right to put this argument on the table. It fits perfectly with their Framework of argument around the dynamic contact centre and dynamic customer engagement.  Even better it is cleanly and clearly understandable to the lay person who resonates immediately with ‘what a royal pain it is to have to sort out any problem with any of their suppliers!’

*Published July 1st 2010