Customer Effort Scores on the doors

Alcatel-Lucent Enteprise has launched its Customer Effort (CE) Audit tool, designed to enable organisations to identify which particular aspects of a customer experience is causing the customer most problems, rather than wait for a particular service problem to occur

The CE Audit takes a series of interaction parameters – number of extra contacts, number of channels used, interaction durations, transfers, resolution lapsed time, total conversation time – and scores them according to the priority given to the interaction, which will vary market to market, individual to individual. Organisations can then start to understand the customer experience from the customer’s point of view, identify which areas in particular are requiring too much effort and address the issues.

The CE Audit takes into account that it is not only the number of events that are significant in scoring customer effort, but that some events can have a multiplier effect on the impact to the customer. It's therefore important to not only count the events, but to also weight their impact based on how it affects the customer.

Recent research from the Harvard Business School showed that customer effort is the most accurate indicator of loyalty – gauged by propensity to both increase spending and repeat spend.

At a time when customer loyalty and retention is essential, organisations need to be looking to become more proactive in creating an experience that is appropriate to each individual customer – this requires the ability to hold 'conversations' with customers across multiple contact channels. Eighty-one per cent of customers will question the competency of an organisation if they are asked for information that the organisation already holds – but because this information is often kept in silos, it is not used to proactively manage the customer interaction.
Brendan Dykes, Principal Business Consultant, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise said:

"The more we can understand each customer conversation and how customers react to them, then the better we can provide customer service that meets their needs, and be proactive in reducing their effort.

"This is not a perfect science and we must recognise there are many factors that impact a customer’s perception of a conversation – agent attitude, empathy, confidence, rapport and listening skills. In addition, not all customers are equal – some customers bring in a lot more revenue, some customers cost a lot more to serve and some customers are more influential than others. But in my experience, key events are all measurable and in most cases, avoidable.

"When looking to improve the customer experience at an individual customer interaction level, prevention is better than cure, but you have to first understand the symptoms in order to develop such preventative care."