A couple of years ago, I watched a Gartner webinar titled “How To Improve Customer Experience By Focusing On The Fundamentals.” The basic guidance was to “Stop thinking about your customers and start thinking like your customers. Focus on the fundamentals.” A key observations was that you can’t think ‘like’ your customers if you don’t know who they are. The recommendation was to do a detailed analysis of customer personas to understand the wants, needs, goals and mindset of each persona in order to design processes and products to be most valuable. It was a good reminder to get outside of our echo chamber and actually get to know our customers.
We need to understand what stressors make things worse for a customer—more effort, more pain, more questions, longer wait times, more errors. Then we can map out the things we can do to reduce or eliminate the stressors. If we really look through the eyes of our customers, we can change the trajectory of the customer journey.
It turns out that the less effort a customer has to invest, the more loyal they become. They spend more, stay longer, and speak more highly of solutions that require less effort. Gartner suggested that the score we should consider is the Customer Effort Score (CES). Similar to the NPS question scored from 0-10 :
To what extent do you agree with the following statement: “The company made it easy for me to [achieve my goal].”
We need to look at all aspects of our product, user experience, processes and procedures to see what we can do to reduce customer effort.
A lot of companies place a major emphasis on designing for customer self-service, but when we speak about self-service, we have to also consider effort. Is it less effort to ask the vendor to do something or to do it themself? Customers don’t want to be required to ask their vendor to do the work. It frustrates them if they can’t do things themself. Often, the vendor solution is to expose more knobs and levers and capabilities to customers so they can control everything, but how does that relate to increased complexity and effort? If the vendor is doing the work for the customer, they can ‘hide’ the complexity from the customer. The customer’s level of effort is to make the request, and behind the scenes, the vendor’s level of effort can be huge - it is just hidden. However, if we move to a self-service model where we simply add more controls and transfer the effort to the customer, then we are likely failing on the Customer Effort Score (CES), and we will not enjoy the loyalty that comes with low effort.
One company I know is totally focused on self-service, but they take a unique approach to monitoring their success in maintaining a high CES. If a customer has to contact the vendor for anything, they consider the contact to be the equivalent of a bug. It goes into their tracking system and becomes a ticket to be addressed. They aggressively work to eliminate the root cause of the contact so that no customer will ever have to face the issue again. Sometimes the fix is in the documentation or the help system, or it can be in the product interface, or even the corporate website and sales and marketing materials.
Another way some vendors focus on self-service is through education and training. They assume that if they teach clients how to do things, then the client can be self-sufficient. Once again, this concept has to be tested against the measure of effort. If a task is hard and requires a lot of effort, simply training the user better will not result in a higher CES and will not produce the desired loyalty results. Even taking a training course requires effort. It could be said that if you have to train me, then it is too complicated (i.e. too much effort).
The precursor goal to self-service is to go back to basic ease-of-use and meaningful automation. Customers should be able to be self-sufficient, but we need to do so in a manner that is predicated on ease of use and reduced effort. The benchmark should be to ask ourselves if it is less effort for a customer to ask us to do something or for them to do it themselves? We don’t want the answer to be that they need to ask us to do the work for them. However, if that is the answer, then we need to address the fundamentals before we try to transfer the effort to the customer. Focus on minimizing effort, and loyalty will follow.