How to help your customers: Customer Effort
What do we understand by Customer Effort (CES)? It is about measuring how much it costs the client to resolve a management or doubt when he comes into contact with the company, giving an assessment to the following question: “How much did it cost you to find this article, perform this management or call the customer service solve you a doubt?” It’s that simple. Customer Effort seeks to analyze customer behavior to reduce the barriers that can be found throughout its life cycle with the company during any type of management. Let us put ourselves in the client’s shoes, not only to analyze the Customer Journey but also to understand the difficulty that certains managements.
In addition, Customer Effort is related to the economic part of the company, that is, it seeks above all to reduce the barriers of the company with the client, or in other words, to facilitate the client’s efforts with the company itself, a client or a person when access the website of a company and looking for a product, the more barriers (steps, difficulty of compression, etc.) are placed, the less likely it will be to close the purchase, we are talking in terms of customer acquisition or crosselling.
HOW CUSTOMERS COMPARE COMPANIES?
Keep in mind that a fundamental rule in business is that customers are not going to compare you with your direct competitor, but with other companies where they make arrangements, that is, they leave outside the sector in which you operate to perform a Benchmarking of their compare basically the companies with which they operate day by day, in many cases they are their favorite brands.
However, keep in mind that your company will not generate the same feeling in the client as another, since the action may be totally different or the reward that will be achieved, but if it is going to weigh how easy is the management and He will compare it with his daily environment.
All companies look for:
– Reduce the operating cost.
-Increase customer satisfaction.
– Automate processes that do not add value in the Customer Cycle Value.
-Facilitate the sale of products without human interaction.
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HOW IS CUSTOMER EFFORT CALCULATED?
Like other indicators in the same area, it is calculated with a numerical scale to the question we saw before, “How much did it cost you to find this article, perform this management or find information?”, Where 1 is associated with extremely difficult and 10 with really easy .
So to get a good assessment it is important to understand our processes and the customer’s journey.
It is clear and we all agree that we cannot have inefficient processes and automate them, because we would be automating inefficiency.
We have to change them to make them more agile and from there understand what is best for our customers. The exact same thing happens with Customer Cicle Life.
A very practical matrix to understand how much effort we generate in our clients is the following:
From the interpretation of the data we will be able to identify those points where it costs the customer to perform a management, we have to be able to trace the drivers that generate that our company is not able to generate satisfaction in our customers.
I leave several tips for those who enter the world of Customer Effort:
1- Customer expectations: very dangerous, in this metric more than in any other it is very important to cover the customer’s expectation, in some cases some companies get to ask if “it has been more difficult than you expected?”, Be careful Do not change the communication channel, in which the client can do it by himself.
2 – Emotional and rational part: When we talk about ration and emotion (both very complex) linked to the client and the company, it always stands out when the client is emotionally linked to the company. On many occasions we do not know what makes the client fall in love with our company but it does irritate him, and this brings down his level of satisfaction. Let’s control what makes them angry.
Let’s be simple and remove the barriers!
Author: Rodrigo González González
