Reduce Customer Effort, Get More Business

Sound like a pretty easy thing to do? See what Eric Michrowski a globally recognized leader in combining Human Performance, Operational Excellence and Process Improvement to drive Business Transformations says about it:

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Eric: A lot of the work that I’ve done in the past, particularly in the call-center space, is really distilling all the various elements into scripts and decision-making and so forth. You’re removing a lot of the thinking processes from the team member. When you go, and you tell a team member, “Okay, reduce customer effort.” and you explain what customer effort really means, it’s actually surprisingly something very simple to understand. Being friendly with a customer is very subjective. Removing the time from the customers’ journey is not subjective. We start explaining that the concept of customer effort translates into how many hours of time are you saving the customer essentially with dealing with us, or how many hours of time are you eliminating in terms of service disruptions or missed appointments or time that the customer is losing. It drives a very different decision because as an example, if you’re in a telecommunications firm, and somebodies calling and telling you, “I had a problem with my cell phone.” you could on one hand, try to be super friendly, on the other one; you could try to make sure resolve it once and for all in that one particular interaction.

That’s what’s going to reduce the most customer effort in that particular time whereas a lot of call centers will start measuring on how many minutes have you talked to the customer, which is actually likely going to increase the customer effort that the customer is going to invest in that transaction.

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