Why Customer Effort is the Right Approach for Customer Service

Though the simplest conception of the performance management debate breaks contact center metrics into two groups—"efficiency" metrics and "satisfaction" metrics—customer service strategy requires a more thorough analysis.

After all, since when is efficiency a bad thing? While it is true that customer-centric businesses cannot sacrifice customer satisfaction for the sake of hitting speed and productivity metrics, organizations that cannot efficiently deliver that satisfaction are doing just as much of a disservice to their customers.

Satisfaction, as it turns out, comes in many different forms. The courtesy and human connection associated with deeper, personalized calls can definitely amplify satisfaction, but they are not inherently superior alternatives to resolve and rapidity. To the extent that customers do not often want to deal with an organization’s customer service department, many, despite opposing insistence from those who believe in "strategic calls," prioritize efficiency.

Of course, the very existence of that paragraph speaks to the difficulty of assessing, let alone defining, customer satisfaction. Elements like resolve, rapidity, courtesy and personalization seem valuable to the customer experience on paper, but they also represent ascriptions rather than discoveries. How a business defines and measures satisfaction might seem logical and even irrefutably accurate on paper, but how a customer perceives that definition cannot be determined in the boardroom.

It is for that reason that organizations which embrace more progressive, customer-minded metrics like first call resolution and other satisfaction scores are not necessarily securing themselves optimal customer loyalty. If the business, rather than the customer, is identifying and measuring the signals of customer satisfaction, it is operating no more customer-centrically than an organization is when relying on internal performance indicators like average handle time.

If all of this is true, and businesses (or customer management writers) cannot tell customers how they should measure their own satisfaction, why is this article so boldly asserting that customer effort is the right approach for customer service?

The answer: even if customer effort score is not the perfect measure of customer satisfaction in and of itself, it fosters the perfect environment for increasing satisfaction.

Whether one is calling to complain about an experience, to inquire about an order that was not delivered or simply to buy a new product, that customer is trading his own time for a service experience. His motivation for the call will dictate the extent to which he resents the situation, but it is highly implausible that he values the potential interaction so much that he has nothing he would rather be doing.

And as long as that is true, the burden is on the business to treat his time commitment as sacred.

Recognition of the time commitment does not mean contact centers should refrain from engaging in "strategic" calls. Knowing that calling customer service can be a hassle, many customers will appreciate those agents who can connect with them on a personal level—and solve both the issue at hand and future issues—over the course of a more comprehensive call.

But what matters is that agents remain mindful of their role. They are there to serve customers on customers’ terms. They are there to bear the burden of navigating challenging issues, unfortunate customer policies and hefty processes to assure a seamless, easy, satisfactory experience for customers.

When that can be achieved with a simple, ten second call, agents are inherently failing when they take twelve seconds. And, by the same token, if a five-minute call could help the business better understand a given customer and pre-empt some potential issues, agents are inherently failing when they only spend three minutes.

Appropriate call length is variable and subject to the specific issue and specific customer at hand. But the dynamic of the call, that which requires agents to understand the customer, address the right questions and think productively about creating the best possible outcome in the most appropriate time, must be held constant.

And that constant is all about customer effort. Quick, painless calls are, by definition, most respectful of the effort concept, but the reality is that a quick call that produces an incomplete solution or routes customers through numerous IVRs or contact channels might ultimately require more effort than one five-minute call with an agent. Effort is not just about time devoted to an issue but how that time is devoted, and if the agent is doing everything he can to remove any burden—be it time or the use of that time—he is minimizing customer effort.

Focusing on that will always produce customer satisfaction. Instead of locking all customers into either a transactional or strategic box, it locks them into one more innocuous one: a desire to receive an optimal experience while traveling through a minimal number hoops, hurdles and roadblocks.

But focusing on customer effort represents more to an organization than a short-term benchmarking item. It also represents a compulsion for businesses to align around more customer-centric principles.

For all the talk of customer-centricity in today’s "age of the customer," few organizations tailor their processes, practices and policies to that concept. In addition to making that failing unavoidably clear to those who choose to see otherwise, emphasis on customer effort will also provide a better understanding of how to evolve.

Consider the multi-channel dilemma. As it stands, when organizations do not offer support in a customer’s preferred, natural channel, they are asking that customer to bear the inconvenience—and effort—of switching to a different, less valuable channel. Treating customer effort as the standard point of evaluation would help rectify that situation.

But those organizations offering service in multiple channels are not necessarily doing so to the benefit of the customer. If agents cannot deliver seamless service across those channels, defined, at a bare minimum, by easily transferring customers to the most valuable channels and by assuring that each representative has a full, 360-degree view of the customer’s issue and previous interactions, the impact on customer effort will not be positive.

Technology rollouts, including IVR and self-service offerings, have long been guilty of the same consequence. They are promoted as making the customer experience easier and more convenient, but in reality, they seem more poised to affect agent effort than customer effort. No assurance is made that the technology-assisted process will require less effort from the customer, and insofar as some problems will require the customer to wait for help from a live agent, to whom they then must retell their entire story, more effort will often be required.

Emphasis on customer effort is therefore valuable for more than its microscopic impact on individual caller satisfaction. It requires businesses to think about how their existing systems contribute macroscopically to the customer experience. To the extent that legacy systems, misguided strategic approaches and antiquated policies create more hassles for customers, these elements are damaging the customer experience and resulting satisfaction.

By evaluating every element of the customer experience in terms of its impact on customer effort, businesses will be able to develop long-term structural support for their ideal customer service vision.