When you make it hard for customers to work with you, they leave.
When you make it hard for employees, they take shortcuts—and customers leave. And when offerings across multiple channels create more confusion than value, you have turned what should be a sponge into a leaky hose.
Reduce Customer Effort
People try to measure customer service in many ways: How quickly was the call answered? Was the customer’s problem resolved on the first call? Was the customer satisfied by the result? Would you recommend us to others? These are good questions, but they skirt around the central issue: How much of a pain are you to deal with? In our experience, it is better to measure some- thing directly than to try to infer it from indirect measurements, but not until 2008 did anyone propose asking straightforwardly, “How easy was it to deal with the issue you had?”
That measurement, a Customer Effort Score (CES), was developed by the Corporate Executive Board, which studied interactions with call centers—that is, customers who had some kind of question or problem. Their research showed that reducing customer effort has a greater impact on customer loyalty than going above and beyond to make up for a problem with refunds, discounts, or other extra effort. The CEB’s basic question asks about service calls: “To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: ‘The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.’”
The CEB has since developed several tools (available on its Website, https://www.cebglobal.com/sales-service/effortless-experience/ bonus-materials.html, registration required) to look at other aspects of customer effort, such as an audit tool for Websites, call centers, and interactive voice response systems. The tool asks questions such as whether information on the Website is written in customer (not company) language, whether navigation is optimized for the customers you most want, whether customers can track an order online, whether phone numbers are easy to find, etc.
The CEB’s Customer Effort tools are valuable but limited. First, they focus on the customer service function itself—a good place to start but inadequate given that companies are wasting customers’ time all along the length of the service journey. Second, the CES itself is better suited to companies with lots of transactions or customers than it is to, say, professional services firms. But every company can and should develop some sort of index of effort. The question should be broadened beyond customer service to ask generally, “How easy are we to do business with?”
Ease of doing business extends to making reservations on the Web, getting your doctor on the phone, understanding your insurance claim statement, or making it easy for the procurement team to have a total view of your activities with a customer. To design this measurement, make sure you are asking about issues customers tell you are most important. In complex services—engineering, professional services, consulting, etc.—surveys will be of limited use in eliciting hard-to-do-business information: You’ll need to sit down and talk—and do the numbers. In these industries, the problem and its solution may lie in the training and behavior of individual partners or executives rather than in design per se.
Reduce Employee Effort
The flip side of customer effort is employee effort: Remember, the Second Principle holds that no heroic efforts should be required by the customer or by employees.
If a measurement of employee effort exists, we have never seen it. Engagement scores, yes—plenty of them, whose business purpose is largely to see whether employees put in extra effort and to find ways to reduce turnover among valuable employees. Other studies convincingly show that employees are happiest and most productive when they can achieve (and be recognized for) a continuing stream of “small victories” and other signs of progress. But, again, why not ask straight out?
The generic question is “How easy is it for you to do right by a customer?” That question should be asked of front-line people such as sales reps, technical support staff, account managers, and anyone else who comes into direct contact with customers. It can be broadened and deepened, however, depending on your business:
- How easy is it for your employees to know where to direct a customer’s query?
- How easy is it for marketing and sales to develop leads?
- How easy is it to line up staff, equipment, and other resources to get started on a project for a new customer? For an existing customer?
- What policies, incentives, procedures, or habits make cross-functional teamwork difficult?
- What other internal requirements create hurdles for you in serving a customer?
Excerpt from “WOO, WOW, AND WIN: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight” by Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O’Connell. Copyright © 2016. (HarperBusiness, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, November 2016). Reprinted by permission.
Patricia O’Connell is president of Aerten Consulting, a New York City-based firm that works with companies to devise content strategies and develop thought leadership for top management. O’Connell is 12-year veteran of Bloomberg Businessweek.com, where she served as news editor and subsequently as the management editor. In addition to “Woo, Wow, and Win,” she is the writer, with author Neil Smith, of New York Times bestseller “How Excellent Companies Avoid Dumb Things Breaking the Eight Hidden Barriers that Plague Even the Best Businesses.”
Tom Stewart is the executive director of the National Center for the Middle Market, a leading source for knowledge, leadership, and research about mid-sized companies, at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. Before joining the National Center for the Middle Market, Stewart served as chief marketing and knowledge officer for international consulting firm Booz & Company (now called Strategy&). Prior to that, he was for six years the editor and managing director of Harvard Business Review, and earlier served as a member of the Board of Editors of Fortune magazine. He is the author of three books: “Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight (co-authored with Patricia O’Connell; “Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations”; and “The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization.”
