How may we help? Increasing loyalty by reducing effort.

Customer loyalty comes not first and foremost from satisfying your customers - it comes from reducing the effort of dealing with you. CES or Customer Effort Scores is a new predictable way of measuring loyalty from the customer base that have been in contact with you. CES predicts the future loyalty and revenue levels. CES can be used to measure direct effects from customer service interactions - in terms of ease of effort which increases loyalty and contact levels which lowers customer support costs.

Meeting customer expectations and reducing effort during customer interactions requires you think of the following:

• Head off the need for follow-up calls and interactions - anticipate the future
• Normally you measure the First call resolution level which indicates how good you are at solving customer problems in the first call. Measure return calls on a slightly longer horizon, 1 or 2 weeks, and you will see that certain types of calls generate subsequent calls for other related problems. Measuring and analyzing these downstream calls will improve your service quality and remove the necessity of future calls. Saving both your resources and lowering the effort of being a customer to you.
• Address the emotional side of interactions - who is at the other side?
• Sometimes we give the same answer and motivation to all customers. Try to balance the emotional mode they're at and their personality. Based on wording the customer uses and how they say things, give slightly different responses. To some your empathy matters, to others exact date for when a replacement will arrive is most important. What will the customer's feeling be after the interaction has finished? That will determine both additional calls, their view about you and the effort of interacting with you.
• Learn from disgruntled customers - how do you continuously improve?
• Disgruntled customers are disgruntled for a reason. They had some expectations that you have not been able to live up to, right or wrong. What can you do to improve your delivery and communication to further improve your delivery?
• Empower the front line to deliver a low-effort experience - what policies are blocking them?
• Measure things like "Ask once" and "Capturing the no's" enables you to identify when your front-line is not empowered to service a customer request. Having a front-line that can handle the entire interaction shows that you care about your customer by trusting the ones handling customer contacts. They're not just a filter to turn away customer requests - they are there for me as a customer.

CES, Customer Effort Scores, captures the customer impressions at the transactional level, negative and positive. It is at the transactional level that you build real loyalty - not on the brand level. Ask the question "How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?".

High levels of CES affects your internal delivery costs as well in terms of repeat calls, call transfers and channel switching. Performing a CES finally enables you to catch customers at risk of defecting and thus you get a last chance of keeping them.

More on this subject can be found in this HBR article: Stop trying to delight your customers