“Making Low Effort Stick”

Reducing customer effort represents a cultural shift in how your team engages with customers and how you’ll prioritise the projects you undertake. But while it’s easy to say, any shift of this nature is difficult to accomplish, mainly because change in a large organisation can be an arduous undertaking.

Taking First Steps

Have a compelling ‘change story’ to communicate Why the change is needed, and make the business case of change. It then becomes the backbone of all communication, training, coaching and general reinforcement.

The most Important Change Agents

Focusing efforts on Coaching instead of Training.

Two types of Coaching tends to occur-

a) Scheduled coaching – sit-down discussions with supervisor to review calls, discuss performance and take corrective action. This might be more punitive than developmental. Over-emphasizing on this type of coaching leads to lower-performing teams.

b) Integrated Coaching – On-the-job coaching, in close proximity to specific customer situations that the coaching is designed to improve. Supervisors who over-emphasize this type of coaching realise a lift of more than 12% in their team’s performance.

The best supervisors focus roughly 75% of their coaching on integrated coaching.

Make It Real

Use creative approaches to help teams quickly understand what qualifies as more or less effort for the customer.

>Sharing of personal customer experiences – Have teams share bad customer service experiences from their personal lives.

>Group quality assurance sessions– Prescreen old customer calls and discuss high effort instances to build awareness and socialise the idea of customer effort reduction.

>Customer Effort Diaries – Get together and share their specific stories – capture specific instances when each person felt they did a great job of reducing effort.

Key Lessons from Early Adopters

Don’t make Effort Reduction another ‘Ask’

Reducing the no. of things frontline staff are being asked to focus on means that they can make effort reduction more of a priority, not just another ask.

The commitment to reducing effort, and the permanence of that approach, needs to become a shift in expectations, not just a new expectation added to the top of the pile.

“In order to get new behaviours to take hold, old behaviours have to be retired”

Baby Steps

• Start with a small number of ways to reduce effort to make the shift more tangible to your teams.
• This way, people know precisely what to do, and they develop a more refined sense for how effort reduction works.
• Supervisors also have a finite set of behaviours to coach for.

Narrowly scope initial pilot expectations for your teams. This may include forward-resolving a specific type of service issue, or using positive language techniques for some common issues.

Lay the Cultural Foundation

Effort reduction is not a quick-hit project. It is service philosophy.

To Get Control, You have to Give Control

For the company and its strategic financial interest, a lot is riding on the skills and abilities of each and every rep in the front.

So, the most common people-management strategy is to minimize the risk by keeping a very tight rein on everything, including companies mandating the exact words each rep must use in all interactions, looking at Average Handle Time(AHT), employing checklists for Quality Assurance (QA) and dictating their every move.

But these strategies of yesterday’s successful companies are fast becoming antiquated and are. no longer sufficient and even actively harmful.

The fourth pillar in creating a world-class customer experience is that low-effort service organisations run their operations very differently and manage their people very differently.

In a low-effort service org, reps determine for themselves how best to handle the unique issue being experienced by this unique person.

80.5% of service orgs say their rep performance has not improved noticeably over the past couple of years. The main questions here are-

• How can companies position their reps for success in today’s world?
• If we want to deliver a low-effort experience, what skills matter most?

The List of skills clustered into four statistically defined categories –

IQ Advanced Problem Solving	Curious Creative Capable of Critical Thinking Experimental	3.6 % improvement in CSAT or in Net Promoter Score
Basic Skills and Behaviors	Demonstrates Product Knowledge Demonstrates Technological experience Communicates confidently, clearly Asks good questions Capable of multi-tasking	5.1% better performance
EQ Emotional Intelligence	Has customer service ethic Extroverted Advocates for the customer Persuasive	5.4% performance boost
CQ Control Quotient	Resilient Able to handle high-pressure situations Takes responsibility of own actions Responds well to constructive criticism by managers Able to concentrate on tasks over extended periods of time	11.2% increase in Rep’s performance!

The impact of CQ is abundantly clear. It is what it takes not just to engage with one customer, but to be able to disengage immediately afterward to be fully effective with the next person. Quit Taking It Personally!

Boosting CQ

It’s not the training. It’s not the people. It’s the work environment those people are subjected to on a daily basis that enables higher rep performance, a lower-effort customer experience, and ultimately loyalty benefits for the company.

3 distinct keys to unlocking CQ

“CQ isn’t learned, it is enabled.“

Most reps already have moderate to high CQ potential. The problem is that most companies inhibit it due to an environment of strict adherence- Judgement and Control are not welcomed in these environments.

“Give control to get control of the front line.“