Have you ever been sent a promo code as a pre-emptive apology for an order snafu? Received a proactive message about a CRM glitch with a plan to make your life easier in the meantime? Gotten quick compensation for a flight delay? 

Happy customers tend to stick around, grow, and publicly advocate for your business. Unhappy customers often churn and can deter others from doing business with you. According to Temkin, after a poor experience, 22% of customers reduced spend and 19% terminated their relationship with the company entirely. According to Zendesk, 54% of customers share bad experiences with more than five people. It’s impossible to overstate the value of customer advocacy and the cost of vocal detractors.

CX teams measure team effort to understand and manage their overall cost of serving customers and to cultivate happy and engaged teams that play a starring role in great customer experiences. Team effort can also make a huge difference in popular metrics like employee promoter scores (“EPS”), quality assurance (“QA”), and operational metrics like case resolution times and escalation rates. When customer-facing employees’ jobs are harder than they need to be, CX teams often see high turnover rates and low EPS scores, lower QA scores, more escalations, and delays in case resolution times — the list goes on. And each of these unfortunate side effects increases your cost of service and creates stubborn obstacles that stand in the way of improving customer experience. 

Why Measure Team Effort?

Team effort is the collective amount of time that customer-facing teams allocate to supporting your customer experience.

Customer effort is a mix of customers’ subjective feelings and what they objectively experience during interactions with your business. Measuring and reducing customer effort is a top priority of many CX organizations and with good reason. 

Last week, we were excited to contribute to the conversation at CCW Digital’s online conference, Customer Experience Challenges, Trends, and Innovations. In case you missed it, we’ve recapped our session, Getting to Frictionless CX, below. Our session featured Dexter Horthy, VP Customer Success & Solution Engineering at Replicated, Frame AI CEO & Co-Founder George Davis, and Matt Wujciak, Market Research Analyst at Customer Management Practice.

We recently discussed why measuring customer effort is important and how it’s different from surveying customer effort. This post introduces a five-step framework to help you think through how to measure customer effort using organic customer feedback and AI. 

Themes = What Makes and Breaks CX

Understanding the themes that drive customer experience enables CX teams to explain changes in customer sentiment and effort, and ultimately, business outcomes. It helps them achieve goals like improving outcomes, finding early warning signals to get ahead of customer expectations, and testing hypotheses about how to improve. 

We recently discussed why high-impact CX needs high-impact measurement and, more specifically, measuring customer effort. This post focuses on measuring customer sentiment with organic customer feedback.