Reducing customer effort should be top of mind for customer success leaders as a key lever to delivering a great experience. Being easy to do business with is often discussed but it can be difficult to deliver across an organization and the many customer touch points. What does it mean to reduce customer effort? Simply put, it is an exercise in evaluating the touch points you have with your customers across the lifecycle and taking action to reduce the effort required for the customer to manage the supplier relationship. We should be considering the amount of effort that is being put on the customer to manage their side of the relationship. The harder it is for a customer to manage the supplier relationship, the more difficult the path to customers success.
Here are five ways that you can step up your game and reduce customer effort.
1. Be Responsive
Being responsive to customer inquiries is foundational to delivering a great customer experience. A good barometer for a customer success team is to think about the type of experience you prefer when interacting with a business. Personally, if I have a question or an issue I expect to get some help as soon as possible. I have made the effort to invest in the product, service and company and with that investment there is an expectation of good service. A failure to be responsive can require the customer to send more email, make more phone calls and create more time for uncertainty to settle in. With every additional piece of effort, frustration and disappoint can settle in. Be mindful of what the customer is going through to ensure this does not occur.
Remember too that it is ok to have interactions with the customer without issue resolution. In these situations customers just want communication. They want to know that you are working on their behalf to get resolution and more often than not, they understand that sometimes resolution takes time. Some communication is better than no communication in the end.
“It is ok to have interactions with the customer without issue resolution.”
2. Set Expectations
Communication is critical when managing a customer relationship, and it all starts with setting proper expectations. From the explanation of the problem(s) you solve on your website to the sales cycle and every post-sales interaction, expectations set the tone for the level of effort that is going to be required to manage the relationship. Outlining roles and responsibilities on each side of the relationship with key stakeholders will determine the ultimate success or failure of the relationship with your customers. Being upfront and transparent with the customer provides a venue for an honest and open dialogue. The quicker you can create this dynamic with your customer, the better positioned you will be to achieve the goals on both sides of the relationship. It is also ok to expect the customer to take on responsibilities, we must hold them accountable as well. Creating an environment for both sides to align to a set of expectations is the best way to avoid turbulence and is a means to reducing one aspect of customer effort.
3. Align Licenses to Training
Personalization in B2B is generally hard. In SaaS it doesn’t get any easier as we work to understand and track the goals of our customers and align those goals to the products and services licenses that they have purchased. We can start by considering the license the customer has purchased and the work that is going to be needed to help the customer fully understand what they have purchased.
We should also be considering each customer’s desired business outcomes (DBOs) and then be working to align the software and services to those outcomes.
We should also be considering each customer’s desired business outcomes (DBOs) and then be working to align the software and services to those outcomes. Left to their own devices, customers will struggle to absorb all of the features and functionality they have purchased with your company. It is up to the customer success manager to help them understand how the pieces all fit together. From the outset, we should be organizing our implementation, account planning and customer communication activities around the license that has been purchased. We must strive to make this the standard to ensure the customer is getting the most out of the relationship and is not put in a position to ask a question like “what did I buy?” or “why did I buy this?”. Avoiding this type of dynamic can reduce customer effort and create a healthier relationship with key stakeholders.
4. Simple Pricing
Take a few minutes to reflect on your current pricing strategy. Now think about it through your customer’s point of view. Is it easy to understand? Does it make it easy for them to business with you? In my experience one of the best ways to create more customer effort is to make pricing and packaging difficult to understand for the customer. Nobody likes to be ‘nickeled and dimed’ and we should be mindful of this as we organize our pricing strategy. Customers often have to sell their relationship with you back into their organization and that often includes the explanation of pricing. The easier it is for a customer to digest and understand pricing the easier it will be for them to sell and defend their investment in you.
5. Empower your Employees
One of the best ways to reduce customer effort is to empower your employees to do what is best for the customer. One of the surest ways to create a poor experience is to extend internal constraints and inefficiencies externally to customers. Empowering the employees that are on the front lines to make decisions that are in the best interest of the customer, not only improves the experience for the customer it will also have a positive impact on your employees. Those interacting with customers the most are typically best positioned to make the right decision to satisfy the customer. Give them the training, support and guidelines to leverage their domain expertise so they can act swiftly to answer questions and solve problems that they are capable of making and your customers will thank you. Get rid of the red tape!
There are many ways that customer effort can be reduced, the ideas above can act as a good guide to get the work underway. I also recommend the installation of a couple of questions that can be asked internally on a regular basis as key customer effort principles: “what happens to the customer experience if we do/don’t do these things?” or “how does this look in the eyes of the customer?”. If you leverage these two questions as a starting point you’re on the right track.
