Webster’s Dictionary defines effort as “strenuous physical or mental exertion”. If you’ve ever had to call a business multiple times to resolve an issue or wasted precious time being hopelessly lost in a confusing automated phone menu, then you can relate to this strenuous mental exertion. The amount of effort customers experience when interacting with a business directly impacts their relationship. If your organization is losing customers despite having a superior product or service, then customer effort may be the culprit. Harvard Business Review takes it a step further stating that “the #1 most important factor in customer loyalty is the reduction of customer effort.” Recent research from Gartner further supports the substantial impact that customer effort has on bottom-line results:
- Customers are four times more likely to become disloyal after a difficult customer experience
- 88% of customers are more likely to spend more with a brand after a low effort experience
- 94% of customers are more likely to repurchase from a brand after a low effort experience
Measuring Customer Effort
An important first step in taking customer effort out of the customer experience is to measure the quality of omnichannel journeys with customer journey analytics. There are three common types of feedback used to measure customer experience:
- Direct feedback: what customers say when you ask, often obtained via surveys
- Indirect feedback: what customers say about you, often obtained via social media or chat
- Behavioral feedback: what customer behavior says about the experience, often obtained via journey analytics
While all three feedback methods are important, customer journey analytics uses operational data to outline various indicators of high-effort, customer journeys, such as:
- # of Channels Visited by the Customer
- Duration in Channel
- Reason Channel Used
- How Often Channel Used
- Occurrences of Channel Transfer/Repeat
Understanding Customer Effort
The importance of analyzing customer effort using journey analytics begins with the visibility organizations gain in understanding customer behavior through omnichannel journeys. When customer effort analysis is limited to a single-channel view, organizations often miss out on high-effort experiences that occur when customers transfer from one channel to another. Integrating NICE’s Nexidia Analytics with Customer Journey Analytics brings further clarity as to why the customer deflected to an agent-assisted channel or repeatedly used a specific channel. This allows organizations to move away from educated guesses about how to improve the customer experience and instead rely on data-driven insights to reduce effort.
Another reason why using journey analytics is beneficial in reducing customer effort is the ability to identify journeys that lead to negative outcomes. The Journey Excellence Score (JES), an innovative metric from NICE’s Customer Journey Analytics predicts which journeys could potentially lead to customer churn or complaint. Organizations benefit as JES proactively uncovers key insights into which high-effort journeys should be investigated first.
To learn more about how Customer Journey Analytics can help your organization take customer effort out of customer experience, listen to our recent webinar on the subject entitled “The Key to Customer Loyalty: Measure and Understand Customer Effort.”