Measures of Success in Customer Service: Customer Effort

What are your KPI’s? Those Key Performance Indicators that you as a call center leader measure to determine how well your team is performing. There are the traditional metrics:

1. Talk Time

2. Handle Time

3. Time Available to Customers

4. Occupancy

5. Quality

6. Ect…. and the list goes on, but are you measuring customer effort?

Customer effort is a measure that describes how hard or easy it is to deal with your company or your customer service teams. This is survey driven where you ask your customers about the ease of doing business with you, translated into metrics like:

1. How many times did you have to speak to someone to get your mission accomplished?

2. How many prompts did you have to listen to before getting to an agent?

3. How many agents did you speak with to accomplish your mission?

4. How many calls did it take to get your issue resolved?

5. And so on… There are many Customer Effort indexes out there so you can customize it for your business.

The reason Customer Effort is such a powerful metric is that studies show that every time a customer has to speak to more than one person, or call you more than 2 times, the score drops dramatically. It also means that all of that additional work that your teams have to do costs resources and produces a lower satisfaction. You can also overlay the score with customer attrition data and you will see that customers who scored you low on the CE metric, have a higher propensity to leave your business, costing you sales.

In the paid options for content and advisory in the Resource Hub, we show you statistically how this works and of course would look forward to work with you and your teams to implement and manage this powerful metric. As always, for a more customized solution, contact us anytime to discuss a consulting engagement.