Customer Effort Score - Is it another way to measure employee engagement

I've recently been doing some reading about Customer Effort Score (CES) and the relationship it appears to have with customer satisfaction (CSAT) and customer loyalty (CL), as measured by Net Promoter Scores (NPS).  If I understand the literature, as customer effort goes up in service engagements, so does the company's "detractor" rating within the NPS metric.  And NPS therefore goes down.  This got me thinking about the theory espoused by Heskett, et. al. in the Service Profit Chain (http://hbr.org/2008/07/putting-the-service-profit-chain-to-work/ar/1) where employee engagement is postulated to be a driver of CSAT.  Though I've always believed that employee engagement directly affects CSAT / CL, I had difficulty finding companies that were mapping employee engagement metrics against CSAT / CL metrics.  So, how could anyone really tell?  It obviously made sense, but how much increase in employee engagement was needed to improve CSAT / CL meaningfully.  And, at what cost?

Anyone who's done customer support work knows that he or she can often place more of the effort of problem resolution on to the customer, if they want to.  Or, they can take more of the effort on to themselves.  Highly engaged employees try to shift effort on to themselves in the full knowledge that the effort avoided by the customer increases that customer's loyalty and satisfaction.  Less engaged employees do the opposite, shifting effort to customers where possible, with the concurrent side effect of lower satisfaction and loyalty over time.

So, in my mind, Customer Effort Scores are a proxy for an employee engagement metric.  One which can be implemented by the support organization itself.  And, if done correctly can track back against the support and account people who are ultimately responsible for the revenue associated with the effected customers. 

CES is the missing link, literally, between employee engagement and customer loyalty.

Achieving high value feedback from short customer surveys

Web survey developers constantly strive to achieve a balance between survey length and data captured.  An optimum survey length ensures a low drop off rate while meeting the survey's data acquisition objectives.  In practice, most feedback projects sacrifice either data capture objectives or response / drop off rates. With customer surveys in particular, it's important to get both high response and to capture the required data.

 

So how can you achieve both high response and a large quantity of gathered data? 

 

I offer these three techniques. 

• The single best technique for keeping surveys both concise and high value is to "Pre-Load" data into your survey database.  In the customer survey context, lots of data is typically available about customers.  Their names, purchases, account managers, regions, etc. are all known.  Often this information has already been synthesized into reporting elements in the company's customer data warehouse.  Pre-loading some of this information to your survey database ahead of time means that it can be used to filter your survey responses into more useful information.  It can also be used to pre-answer some questions or to automatically "route" or "branch" the questionnaire.  Helping to shorten it.  But most of all, any data you can pre-load from your customer databases is data you don't have to ask questions to acquire. 
• Question Routing or Branching is another great way to shorten surveys.  Branching let's you only ask questions to those people who can or should answer them, thus shortening the questionnaire for all participants. 
• Data Piping is also a great technique for shortening questionnaires.  By inserting pre-loaded data into survey questions or answer alternatives, piping saves you from the need to ask for data in order to answer a question.  If your survey system can both pipe in data and automatically branch / route based on piped in data it makes the survey doubly efficient from a time utilization perspective.

By using data you already have, along with "branching / routing" and "piping" techniques you can design your questionnaires to be concise while gathering lots of actionable and useful data, and do it without annoying your customers to the point where they won't give you the feedback you need.

Convergence of CFM and VOC

A number of research organizations, including Gartner and Forrester, have recently written about how Customer Feedback Management (CFM) and Voice of the Customer (VOC) are converging in businesses, based on the spread of new social media technologies for gathering qualitative feedback.  I came across great article written by Leslie Ament of Hypatia Research (http://www.www.hypatiaresearch.com/) that is a good description of how and why this is happening as well as what to think about if you are considering incorporating the new social media feedback channels into your customer feedback processes.

Customer Feedback Management (CFM) has traditionally been almost entirely based upon customer surveys.  Mainly, customer satisfaction surveys.  But, in the last several years also on customer loyalty surveys.  CFM's purpose was to gather operationally useful customer information for customer retention, sales intelligence (i.e. prospect identification) and marketing input (largely by IDing super loyal customers to do case studies on).

Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs, though also reliant upon customer surveys - often customer satisfaction surveys or sometimes CSAT questions in broader customer surveys, also included customer feedback via market research studies, data from call centers, bulletin boards, chat rooms and the like.  A variety of analytical techniques are used to distill the customer's "voice" from the data.  Today, the number of on-line feedback sources includes twitter feeds, blog commentary, Facebook, LinkedIn and other on-line communities, as well as all the other stuff.  VOC initiatives were organized around the need to maintain a clear understanding of company value proposition, competitive strength and weakness, new market opportunities, new requirements for existing products and the like. 

Technology is beginning to allow a blending of customer feedback channels such that a fuller picture of the customer can be achieved by incorporating the best elements of CFM and VOC. 

CFM was driven mostly by the customer service and sales organizations.  VOC by Marketing.  So it would seem that some new "Customer centric" structure needs to emerge in organizations to manage the convergence of all the customer data as well as the reporting and business process dynamics that will result. This is a point Bruce Tempkin has been making in his commentary at his blog "Customer Experience Matters" (http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/).  Anyway the article follows below.  Enjoy!

http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/14784