For decades, brands have used metrics that gauge how easy (or difficult) a time customers have interacting with them, as well as how much effort it takes for customers to complete such transactions. At a glance, metrics that measure ease, effort, customer satisfaction, and the like can be very helpful for both alerting organizations to certain problems and giving them a surface-level idea of what those issues are. This makes them hand canaries in the coal mine.
While these metrics certainly have their uses, it’s much more difficult for brands to use them to find the deeper meaning behind problems. That is, unless they take part in a few brief exercises. Keep reading for the rundown on the exercises we suggest you apply to your own ease and effort scores.
Three Exercises to Help You Find the Meaning Behind Customer Ease & Effort Scores
- Driver Modelling
- Transaction Subgroups
- Customer Subgroups
Exercise #1: Driver Modelling
One of the best ways for brands to glean the meaning behind their metrics is to set them as the outcome measure of driver modelling. This technique enables organizations to not only better understand key parts of the customer experience, but also customers’ perceptions of those components. Driver modelling also lets organizations know whether they’ve used enough such metrics to adequately explain how effort is being impacted.
Exercise #2: Transaction Subgroups
Every interaction with your organization brings with it its unique amount of customer effort. Because of this, it’s handy to divide your transactions into groups depending on how much effort customers perceive they entail. Thus, diving deeper and analyzing transactions in this manner can help brands pinpoint friction or pain points, then create solutions to deal with them.
Exercise #3: Customer Subgroups
Your brand has a variety of different interactions—your customer base is even more diverse. Rather than study this base as a whole, brands can and should profile subgroups who, say, tend to report dissatisfaction more often than usual. Some groups of customers will, unfortunately, have a harder time interacting with your brand than the rest, and though the possible reasons behind that vary wildly from industry to industry, profiling subgroups like this can help brands further identify CX pain points and, more importantly, fix them in a way that those customers find meaningful.
Meaning Over Metrics
Like we said before, metrics have their uses and are helpful for letting brands know that customer satisfaction, ease, effort, etc are shifting in one direction or the other.
Applying these techniques to your metrics can make them much more powerful, giving your organization the context and the details it needs to meaningfully transform your customer experience. Your customers will thank you for it and feel much more valued, creating a human connection that transcends market forces and that builds a better bottom line for your brand.
Want to learn more about effort and ease and their purpose in customer experience? Check out our free white paper on the subject here!
