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Topic(s): The Platform Customer Experience Human Connection

Customer convenience is key to survive. Here’s how you measure it:

If you are familiar with Steven Van Belleghem, you may remember that he shared a full slide deck on how to focus on customer experience during and after the corona crisis (Link to the slides here). In his presentation, Steven claims that in order to win a customer's heart these days, there are 3 elements you need to focus on:

  1. Having empathy
  2. Acting responsibly
  3. Offering the ultimate convenience

These all add value at the moment and will strengthen your customer relationships.

 

Let’s focus on convenience

Stevens point comes down to this: a customer's life is hard enough, and as a company, you shouldn't be making it harder. If you offer great digital convenience now, people will start to rely on it. If you don't, you will lose market share, and it will be difficult to catch up once the crisis is over.

One concrete strategy to make your customer experience more convenient is to actively remove friction in at every transaction of stage in the customer journey. Steven suggests appointing friction hunters that list the inconveniences, but there's a more objective way. You can simply ask your customers and measure convenience using the CES metric.

 

Make things easy and measure it

CES stands for Customer Effort Score and measures how easy or difficult it is for the customer to interact with your company. It has been around for a while in the customer service field, but these unusual global circumstances are the perfect opportunity for this metric to take center stage.

 

Questions in Hello Customer
The questions in Hello Customer.

 

The original question uses the following statement:

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: 'company x made it easy to handle my issue'

You can easily tweak this question to your new initiatives, for example ‘company x made it easy to order through the webshop’. It's the perfect question to ask once an order is placed or when your customer received their products in the mail.

 

Respondents reply on a 7-point scale and the average of all replies is your score. A high average indicates that your company makes things easy for the customer, and that's exactly what we're aiming for! According to research by Harvard Business Review, CES even outperforms NPS in predicting customer loyalty. So removing friction in your processes will be worth it in the long run.


Image source: Harvard Business Review.

 

Objectivity and direct feedback

Using a metric to measure convenience has multiple benefits. It’s an objective starting point, gives you a goal to aim for, and is an easy way to measure improvements as well. Especially now, when companies need to change their processes and lack in-person feedback, it's more important than ever to check what customers think of your new way of doing things.

top negative categories webshop

 In our platform, you can select CES as the metric for your survey and customize the question. By asking why a customer found the process easy or hard, you get the direct feedback you normally would have had with a face-to-face conversation. Also, it doesn’t leave you guessing on what to improve. Our AI will analyze all the replies and you'll end up with an exact list of things you need to work on.

 

 

So, to conclude

The Customer Effort Score might not have been a preferred tool for many customer experience managers in the past, but today it's more relevant than ever. By measuring customer efforts, removing friction and just making life easier for your customers you can set yourself apart in the market and win customers for life.

Want to learn more about using different CX metrics to measure the customer experience? Check out our 'NPS, CSAT or CES?' e-book right here.