Implementing A Customer Effort Strategy Effectively

March 12, 2018 Jim Iyoob

An effective customer effort strategy makes your products and services more attractive to buyers by simplifying offers and increasing customer support. Basically, customers who can spend less effort toward the same end are happier customers.

More and more, the markets reward firms who take the time to implement new strategies aimed at reducing customer effort. Not all techniques are the same, and good data analytics is the key to your company’s future success.

The Customer Effort Challenge

It isn’t enough to just produce a product and plop it down on the store shelves. You might sell a few units that way, but if you expect to stay competitive you must support your customers throughout the entire exchange.

From the moment you first make contact until after the product’s life comes to an end, you are there to provide the customer with an exceptional overall experience:

• Information – Educate your customers on your brand and the benefits of your products.
• Easy Transactions – Make it simple to buy through multiple channels.
• Service and Support – Streamline complaint resolution and product returns.
• Follow Up – Encourage repeat business with rewards programs and special discounts.

Customer effort is the most important variable and customers consider the amount of time they waste when evaluating their experiences with your company. If disappointed, they may not buy from you again.

Reducing customer effort often comes down to eliminating lost time, but the customer also expects humanized interactions:

• Accessible – Make your products, website, and call center available to your customers.
• Accurate – Information needs to be consistent, current, and relevant.
• Expertise – Your agents must answer questions about products and processes with authority.

To make things more challenging, most customers also expect personalized service. They want to feel a connection with someone who understands what they need without being told the same information repeatedly.

Data Collection with Technology

You need useful information to build and coordinate your strategy. Most companies rely on customer feedback metrics to tell them how their service representatives are performing.

CSAT surveys and Net Promoter Scores are proper information tools for sampling specific interactions, but they both have a limited scope over a limited range.

ETECH Insights puts a robust AI to work gathering data and supporting your agents. Software listens in on conversations and makes decisions about which inputs are the most important.

That data identifies customer preferences and compares them to agent behaviors. Analysis of this information highlights patterns and predicts behaviors. This helps management to organize better responses reduce your customer’s effort.

Streamline Customer Experience

Once armed with better information, your business processes can focus in on the most common points of interest for your customers.

It’s hard to implement these solutions without good data:

• Develop procedures to standardize responses to customer concerns across departments.
• Train agents to respond to common challenging situations.
• Empower customer self-help by supplying demanded information and features on your website.
• Customize experiences by predicting customer desires and behaviors.
• Automate follow up with customers to encourage repeat business.

Customers typically reward businesses able to keep up with the rapidly changing market. Lowering their effort incentivizes more purchases and leads to higher revenues.

Technology and AI driven data collection help you develop the efficient customer effort strategy that your buyer’s demand. It combines the best information with a human responder to deliver superior results.