Reducing Customer Effort Is Your Best Investment
The best marketing investment your company can make doesn’t have anything to do with marketing. It all comes down to three words: reducing customer effort. In fact, Harvard Business Review says it is the most important factor when it comes to engaging customers. Today’s customers are busy and don’t want to have to jump through hoops to get the help they need, especially if a product breaks or they have issues with a service. Reducing customer effort makes life easier for customers and improves their impression of the brand and their overall customer experience.
Unfortunately, many companies make it harder on customers just to make it easier on themselves and their employees. Consider the example of a customer who sent a tweet to her bank asking for a question about her accounts. Instead of getting the help she needed, the bank responded with a direct message telling the customer to call a 1-800 number for help. The bank’s response defeated the whole purpose of the tweet and made the customer work harder to get the help she needed, instead of simply answering her question via Twitter. Other companies make customers work harder when they assume customers know things that they don’t, when they make customers go through extra steps to get the help they need, or when they aren’t available at convenient times. Instead of providing things like 24/7 call centers or chatbots to make communicating with customers much easier, many companies still force customers to wade through complicated phone trees with faulty answering systems to get help that might not even be what they are looking for.
Companies that reduce customer effort can stand out in the sea of unaccommodating brands. Providing ways to make life easier for your customers is a sure way to show your unique qualities and reduce customer effort. Time and money spent improving customers’ lives is the best investment you can make in marketing—far better than creating an expensive commercial or traditional ad campaign. Making customers’ lives easier means they will want to come back for more and tell their friends, which is a surefire way to keep your brand in business.
Blake Morgan is the author of More Is More. Sign up for her weekly customer experience newsletter here.
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7 年Nice article, I think it's also important that great customer experience is replicated across all channels of communication. I recently tried to do a transaction with a bank over the telephone and was presented with all sorts of barriers. I gave up and went into the local branch the next morning. It was resolved, without fuss, immediately. That opens up all sorts of questions re online, versus telephone, versus a local presence.
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7 年I agree, we all need to realise that the 'can do' attitude assists with gaining and retaining clients. 'The computer says no' attitude of so many companies is a sad reflection on society. If there's a will, there's a way! If you do one thing today, make sure it is something that helps someone now, or something that will make their life easier into the future, and they are far more likely to stay with your business. In addition, they are far more likely to recommend you to others! Win-win, job done.
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7 年Great article!
Chief Customer Officer @ TTP Outsourcing | Sourcing the best offshore talent The Philippines has to offer
7 年Couldn't agree more.
Director @ Cloud Software Group (Citrix) | Pride ERG | Digital Business Transformation
7 年I see a lot of companies now moving from the traditional CSat or NPS advocacy performance to measure Effort taken. While effort is relative, there is enough data to help understand how customers like to be served.. Traditional operating model still have takers but you have to cut through them to become Agile and provide the gift of choice to customers