So your organization set a goal around improving your Customer Effort Score, now what? Without knowing where or why effort is occurring in customer interactions, where do you start? At Tethr, we help customers address this problem every day, so we wanted to outline the common steps customers take when using Tethr to get started reducing customer effort and improving Customer Effort Scores. MORE

How can a company achieve a good Customer Effort Score? They call Company A and wait on hold for seven minutes before speaking with a customer service representative. Their IVR-directed call is answered by a customer service representative in under three minutes. The main reason why Company B just gained a loyal customer is because they earned a good customer effort score. Why is reducing customer effort important? MORE

If you’re banging your head against the wall, wondering what the cause of your lackluster customer effort scores (CES) is, good on you. You care about your customers! The answers you’re looking for, though, could be hiding in a place you haven’t thought to look: your self-service strategy. Listening to our customers’ stories , we hear time and time again that good self-service strategy is central to lowering customer effort. MORE

User experience. Music to our humble ears, as you might have guessed; but it’s also a guiding principle in our approach to self-service support. Though there are many aspects to good self-service strategy, search remains principle among them. Specifically, the search experience. Search reporting is the process of monitoring search behavior data to find actionable insights that can help improve the user experience. MORE

Earlier this month, Tethr , Kustomer and Challenger hosted the largest virtual customer experience summit of the year. How to manage customer experience in challenging times. Most are striving to be more proactive in reaching out to their customers. MORE

First contact resolution, average handling time…many brands consider these KPIs critical for measuring their customer service success. While resolving an issue quickly may restore faith in a customer, minimizing his effort to begin with is the greatest way to earn his trust. According to a study by Corporate Executive Board, reducing customer effort is key to earning long-term loyalty. So how can you reduce customer effort? MORE

If your customers want to pump their own gas, you let them. The same goes for self-service. If your customers prefer to solve issues on their own (as it turns out, they very much do ), you need to enable them to do so. Not only that, you need to make that experience as frictionless as possible. Executed well, a web self-service experience can be your 24/7 customer support department. By easy, I mean low effort. MORE

As the age of the customer continues to influence the shape and strategy of customer interactions, customer experience (CX) data such as Net Promoter Score (NPS ® ), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) inform strategic discussions across industries and verticals. The objective to offset customer acquisition costs, which in SaaS alone averaged $1.15/$1.00 Here’s how our Customer Advocacy team does it. MORE

You hunt for the customer service number in the user guide to see if they can help, wait on hold for 22 minutes and then have the Tier-1 support agent walk you through a series of steps that you’ve just finished trying yourself based on the troubleshooting instructions. Limited edition or not, it’s just not worth the effort. Customer effort matters. What are high-effort customer service interactions? MORE

Customer experience (CX) is evolving. As a CX leader, you also need to know which technologies will help you achieve your core objectives in managing the customer experience. Adopt Technologies That Align with Your Customers’ Expectations. Continue reading to learn more about the best practices that will help your contact center deliver outstanding customer experience and beat the competition. MORE

This is the third of a five-part blog series that outlines the Five Best Practices for AI Self-Service Without Compromise. Gartner predicts that customers soon will prefer using speech-driven interfaces to other forms of self-service when given a choice. Use this guide to automate your contact center and Customer Experience (CX) with AI self-service in voice, chat, and text. MORE

Whether that looks like call center agents working from home, a company-wide struggle to migrate quickly to digital tools, or even canceled or reduced services as customers tighten their belts, your operation probably encountered struggles this year that seemed unimaginable in the January of 2020. MORE

I am a Customer Experience and Contact Center Manager with over 15 years of contact center experience. Customer Service > Customer Experience. Tell Us More About Yourself… What was your first job and what did you learn about customer service in it? As I was competing against several other boys in the neighborhood, I learned early on to treat customers with respect and exceed their expectations. Meet Sean Hawkins! MORE

Reducing customer effort has become a high-priority objective for most companies. Central to improving customer effort scores is useful and timely content. Yet, in spite of all of the great content that companies produce—from onboarding and customer education to product documentation and knowledge base articles—there is one immense, frustrating hurdle still facing the customer: Google Search. Why is the search experience so difficult? MORE

How our customer success team uses the power of conversation intelligence to improve customer experience by listening at scale, turning raw, unstructured voice of customer data into actionable insight so you can transform your business and your customer experience. MORE

For customer support and success professionals, there are three that likely come up on a frequent basis: customer effort score (CES), Net Promoter Score (NPS®), and customer satisfaction (CSAT)—the primary customer success KPIs. In terms of understanding and fostering customer loyalty, CES has proven particularly useful. According to Gartner , CES is “25% more predictive of customer loyalty than the next best metric.” MORE

Customers don’t just experience your brand through one channel anymore. A customer might submit a complaint over social media, and want to pick this up again over email or the phone without losing any context between channels and interactions. Customers are short on time. MORE

Intelligent routing and online customer support are just some of the ways these kinds of advances enhance customer self-service while updating the customer experience. When it comes to customer experience, an effortless experience must be the primary focus. MORE

In the world of customer experience, there’s more than one way to shine a penny. Net promoter score (NPS) , customer satisfaction (CSAT), customer effort score (CES)—each of these KPIs provides useful insights into the customer’s journey. They help us answer questions like: How do customers find our help content? What kind of customer support experience do customers prefer? MORE

Customer Effort Score (CES) gauges the amount of perceived work a customer has to put into dealing with your company. That can include the effort behind making a purchase, resolving a service query or signing up for an account. Why does Customer Effort Score Matter? MORE

Alex presents a bounty of useful information and data about the impact of customer effort on customer loyalty. Indeed, multiple independent research firms have research that states customer effort has the single largest impact on customer loyalty. Furthermore, customer self-service is consistently the highest ranked driver in lowering customer effort. Alex van Dijk presents Reducing Customer Effort. MORE

What’s an effective self-service model? One that improves customer effort , which leads to improved customer loyalty. Bottom line though, it’s about customer effort. How do you achieve an effective customer self-service model? Jack nails it when he covers what it takes to successfully undergo a transformation from reactive to an effective content experience. This role is driving effective self-service models. MORE

Surprise, surprise: the marketing crowd has found yet another approach to reaching customers more effectively. Let’s apply this concept to self-service support. In many ways, psychographic marketing is a form of direct customer engagement —an approach to gaining a deeper understanding about our customers. For example, we might know who is coming to us for self-service support, but do we really know why ? The same applies to self-service. MORE

This is the fourth of a five-part blog series that outlines the Five Best Practices for AI Self-Service Without Compromise. Gartner predicts that customers soon will prefer using speech-driven interfaces to other forms of self-service when given a choice. Use this guide to automate your contact center and Customer Experience (CX) with AI self-service in voice, chat, and text. MORE

Like most customers seeking self-service , all I know from the outset is that I need help. As we mentioned in our blog post on Strategies for a More Personalized Self-Service Experience , the Whirlpool® product help is a particularly good example of easy-peasy click navigation. All I have to do is self-identify from step to step. The most profound thing about this product support experience, though? MORE

Customer experience is no different. Most customers prefer one support call to two— self-service over having to wait on someone else for answers. In a word: most of us expect customer effort to be as low as possible. Hello, Customer Experience? The problem for companies that track and analyze customer experience data is that the number of ways customers interact with us is proliferating. MORE

Believe it or not, organizing self-service support content is a lot more difficult than it looks. There are a number of approaches to structuring content that can help stakeholders refine their self-service content strategy to reduce customer effort. Same idea with self-service content: authors can leverage hierarchies to better craft and restructure documentation. Improve content structure, reduce customer effort. MORE

These days, the definition of customer education is expanding. More specifically, customer preferences are shifting —across the entire customer journey—toward self-service. What Is Customer Education? In a nutshell, customer education encompasses all the efforts a company puts toward creating a more informed customer. Why Self-service Is So Important. Think knowledge base articles, FAQs, and customer stories. MORE

According to Gartner , organizations should strive to deliver low-effort customer experiences because simplicity is the most significant driver of loyalty. In fact, 96% of customers who experience a high-effort interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience. By avoiding these errors, businesses can drive the shift towards frictionless interactions and enhance the overall customer experience. MORE

Self-Service: The New Battlefield. Gartner, an American research and advisory firm, has predicted that this year will be a tipping point when customer experience becomes more important to consumers than even products and services. Currently, 40 percent of consumers prefer self service over speaking to a person, and 70 percent now expect websites to have self service solutions available. Make It Easy for Customers to Find Answers. MORE

In the effort to shore up key performance indicators (KPIs) as they relate to customer experience and the customer journey, too many organizations overlook the most important thing: the customer. Examining the journey through the customer’s eyes . MORE

Self-service for the sake of self-service just isn’t enough. Because the truth is, your self-service experience probably isn’t as good as it could be. And hidden sticking points could be leaving customers dissatisfied, frustrated, and hampering your aspirations for blockbusting, show-stopping ticket deflection. What follows is a list of common self-service fails to avoid. MORE

Applications that Improve the Customer Journey. Voice biometrics is another high-tech solution that is going mainstream; a leading bank’s recent ad campaign publicizes that they know customers “by the sound of their voice.” IVAs are self-learning; their ’intelligence; is continually evolving based on data inputs from each new interaction. In essence, IVAs use science to elevate the art of self-service. Customer Benefit. Omni-channel self-service. MORE

This is the third of a five-part blog series that outlines the Five Best Practices for AI Self-Service Without Compromise. Gartner predicts that customers soon will prefer using speech-driven interfaces to other forms of self-service when given a choice. Use this guide to automate your contact center and Customer Experience (CX) with AI self-service in voice, chat, and text. MORE

The technologies used in modern contact centers are instrumental in delivering great customer experiences. Customers seek effortless experiences, and the key to satisfying them is by using technologies in ways that serve their needs. Here are five ways to reduce customer effort through the efficient use of contact center technologies. Many brands use IVR menus to serve their mobile customers, believing that the technology saves time. MORE

Here at Tethr, we talk a lot about reducing customer effort. After all, research shows that minimizing effort is critical to customer loyalty and improving the overall customer experience. And when done well, great self service options make customers happier. MORE

Self-service is finally coming of age, with leading enterprises embracing the paradigm of customers helping themselves. But it turns out that not all self-service options are created equal. Walmart axed its Mobile Express Scan & Go self-checkout experience due to negative feedback from customers. The pilot required them to download an app, self-scan items as they shopped and then show proof of payment before exiting the store. MORE

The discussion around how to reduce customer service costs is not a new one. For decades, service organizations have been proposing innovative ways to cut operational costs in customer service: Let employees bring their own coffee? ??. field services. MORE

Surprising and delighting customers is a fantastic way to increase customer loyalty, and outshine competitors. What do customers know they want consistently from your call center team? That’s what Customer Effort Score, or CES, is all about and routinely positive CES scores can create loyalty that is just as lasting. This really gave my company the chance to shine –– efficient customer service is what made us better than our competitors. MORE

What is digital customer experience? The digital customer experience is the sum of all the digital interactions between a customer and a company, and the customer’s impression of them. Customer interaction management to the rescue. MORE

Image courtesy of Unsplash Does self-service reduce or increase effort? Not just for customers but also for your business? I wrote about technology and the customer experience a couple times last year; after all, that''s what self-service is all about: technology. ATMs, online flight check-in, self-checkout grocery lanes, IVRs, online FAQs and knowledgebases, and more. How does self-service help the business? MORE