Did you know the best marketing investment a company can make to boost business growth has nothing to do with marketing?
You read that right!
No matter how competitive the market is in your industry, it will always come down to how simple and straightforward you make things for the customers — without jeopardizing the customer experience design principles.
Reducing customer effort score is one of the most important factors when it comes to developing products and services as it goes on to engage more customers, make their lives easier, and improve their overall brand impression.
Therefore, we prepared this post to help you understand why you should strategize to reduce customer effort and get acquainted with the consequent advantages!
So let’s cut to the chase and get started, shall we?
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What is a Customer Effort Score?
Before you set out to reduce customer effort or figure out how to create an effortless experience , you should learn about Gartner Customer Effort Score or CES.
What is CES, you ask?
Well, it is a customer experience or customer effort score survey metric that helps companies determine the state of existing customer interactions and work towards improving them by reducing customer effort along the customer journey.
Companies that track the customer effort score often generate positive word-of-mouth which helps improve the Net Promoter Score, increase repurchases, reduce costs, and boost employee retention as well as increase customer loyalty.
Go ahead and read through some of our previous posts to learn about CES surveys, customer effort score question, and customer effort score calculation.
10 Reasons for reducing customer effort
It’s time we discuss the potential benefits of knowing how much effort is enough and reducing or achieving a good customer effort score that results in maximizing business growth. Let’s dive right in!
1. Reduce customer churn
Here’s a stat worth your consideration when developing a customer experience strategy — only one in every 26 customers makes an effort to convey the bad customer experience to a business.
What do the rest do? They simply leave!
This says a lot about modern-day customers and the impact of competition on their purchasing decisions. Today, customers have so many options to choose from that they don’t even care about complaining.
Moreover, incentives like free gifts, discounts, or cashbacks won’t fill the gap left by poor service experiences. These will not result in customer loyalty.
The only way to make them stay is to help them get their job quickly and with minimum effort. A low customer effort score is a massive motivator for customers to stay loyal.
2. Save service cost and effort
Customer service shortcomings lead to an increase in customer service cost and effort, which in turn can reduce brand loyalty.
Brands that are unable to provide adequate follow-up calls or generate multiple customer support tickets will find it extremely challenging to get in terms with the growing number of customer complaints.
This will only lead to an increase in resolution time, which means an increase in service cost and effort. Therefore, brands should prioritize customer complaints by identifying customer service trends.
Companies can save the excessive money spent on customer service while ensuring improved customer experiences. The more the number of quick resolutions, the less will be the overall service cost and effort.
3. Better decision-making
The objective of reducing customer service decisions pushes companies to make quick and better customer service-related decisions.
Remember, delivering low customer effort and excellent customer service isn’t the job of just one department in your company.
The departments will have to acknowledge the shared vision and make top-level decisions considering productivity, cost, resources, and other factors that impact customer service.
The idea is to make the right decisions at the right time and help customers get their job done in the least number of steps.
4. Achieve customer loyalty and more returning customers
Do you want customers to keep returning and do more business with you? Deliver good customer service experiences!
This is a no-brainer. Customers are always in search of brands they can stick with. In other words, they are looking for reliable brands.
This is precisely why we recommend brands deliver customer effort score survey with appropriate customer effort score question at different touchpoints to learn and identify instances that trigger poor service experience and drive customers away.
Addressing the issues will help reduce customer effort score and will promote more repurchases given that 34 percent of customers are willing to make repeated purchases from brands that deliver positive customer experience.
5. Reduce negative online reviews
How does reducing customer effort score relate to online reviews? Well, people never forget how they feel. And customers take the saying to a whole new level.
Customers never forget how a brand they wanted to do business with, made them feel. Indeed, they will connect with the customer support representative and share their feelings or customer feedback.
But, the bout will always end in an online review left against your company. This is an excellent reason for companies to work on reducing customer effort score.
The negative online reviews are accessible to your potential customers as well. So, disgruntled customers will have a significant impact on your sales since modern-day customers read online reviews to make an informed purchasing decision.
6. Enhance brand reputation
Brands need a reliable reputation to stand out. Moreover, they need to develop a reputation for delivering outstanding customer service. Accomplishing this will easily set your company apart in a sea of companies that only talk the talk.
Did you know that a recent study claims that almost 76 percent of customers in the UK find it more compelling when brands deliver a positive customer experience?
These customers are more willing to be subjected to an excellent experience and almost 55 percent of them claim to pay more if a company can guarantee a better customer experience!
Therefore, you should focus on building a brand that can guarantee a positive customer experience, which is often a consequence of reducing the overall customer effort score.
7. Promote staff happiness
Companies that have happy customers will have happier staff. And a company that has a happy staff will have happier customers. The cycle is real and something your organization should aspire to achieve.
Companies that work towards reducing customer effort score often find their employees happier after a while. This is because the employees will have to deal with fewer customer service-related issues and not get subjected to rants by angry customers.
Such a connection between employee and customer experience can translate into the company becoming more customer-friendly, positive, innovative, and solutions-oriented — a win-win situation for everyone involved!
8. More opportunities to upsell
Companies that significantly reduce customer effort score often leave a strong impression.
Their solid brand reputation is enough to influence customers’ purchasing decisions and make them buy more products and services!
Brands that tend to foster strong business-customer relationships at every touchpoint will find it easier to leverage upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
The data collected at each touchpoint can fuel your quest to reduce customer effort, improve customer experience, and make more sales.
The energy and effort you spend in reducing customer effort score and gaining customers’ trust will return to you through upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
9. Word-of-mouth marketing
Wonder what’s the most profitable form of marketing? It’s your customers’ word-of-mouth. It is the most effective form of marketing available to all companies. However, not all can use it profitably.
Let’s take ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance, for instance. The act pushes companies to make adjustments to their products and services to help people with certain disabilities.
If such differently-abled customers find it easier to use your services, they will be more than willing to talk about your brand to other differently-abled people in their network, especially about their customer interaction.
Customers will leave positive online reviews, which will boost peer-to-peer influence. In other words, companies that work towards reducing customer effort are more likely to win more customers through word-of-mouth marketing.
10. Improve products and services
Lastly, reducing customer effort score will push your brand toward a quest to improve the products and services you offer. These are elements that are in direct contact with the customers.
Therefore, extending poor customer service through them might even cause a complete store shutdown. The best thing is that the idea of improvement isn’t complicated. All you need to do is simplify the products and services.
You will have to devise solutions and upgrades that help you persevere in your quest to make customers’ lives simple.
This endeavor might make you eliminate parts of the products and services that are irrelevant to the objective, which will further reduce your manufacturing cost and boost the profit margins.
Final thoughts!
There you have it. We shared some of the most compelling benefits of measuring customer effort scores and lowering customer effort for business growth.
We believe that reducing customer effort score is one of the most effective ways to boost customer experience while making the brand more competitive than ever. Not just that, but it is the fastest way to stand out in a market full of accommodating brands!
When you make the customers’ lives easier, they get the time to notice your unique qualities and the effort you put to facilitate immaculate CX. Did you find this post helpful?
Also, don’t forget to check out other informative posts related to customer effort score calculation on the blog!