Service leaders are often tasked with a difficult mandate: improve the quality of the service experience while minimizing costs. For more than five years, we’ve argued that the way to break out of this trade-off between cost and quality is to minimize the effort customers must exert in the service interaction. Recently, though, we’ve updated our guidance on exactly how to do that by identifying 5 key ways that low-effort companies operate.
None of these ways to become a low-effort service organization require a significant overhaul of the contact center or its strategy. Instead, we have identified a number of quick-win steps that companies can take to help minimize the effort their customers must expend and, thus, minimize consumer disloyalty while containing costs. We’ve found that the best low-effort companies share a common set of strategies, nearly all of which are implementable for every service organization:
- Boost self-service channel “stickiness”
- Hire reps with low-effort potential
- Develop low-effort rep skills
- Create a climate that enables reps to provide a low-effort interaction
- Measure customer effort and identify the most likely spots where customers must exert effort in the service journey
We’ve recently launched a new toolkit that walks you through these five steps and provides explicit guidance on how to make progress in each area. Furthermore, we’ve provided our B2B members with additional guidance and best practices specific to their business model. Take a look at the new toolkit and let us know what you think!
The toolkit is designed to help you make progress toward becoming a low-effort organization no matter how far along you are on the low-effort journey or where your organizational opportunities lie. Where do you think your organization might see the greatest opportunity, though—self-service, hiring, skill development, organizational climate, or measuring effort?