What recent years have taught us is that customer experience can be a game changer for business success. As Forrester Research’s Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine insightfully pointed out, customer experience is “the best predictor of business success… It’s not just customer service – it’s every interaction, from the point at which they discover you to the moment of purchase to each of the touchpoints in the ongoing relationship.”
Because each product and every process in your business is part of the customer experience ecosystem you want to build, tracking and improving those can be a real challenge. From customer support hold time to the mobile app design, and the terms & conditions – customer friction needs to be measured and lowered.
The Impact of Experience
Today’s customers are loyal to banks that recognize their individuality and respond with products, services and experiences that are personalized to their unique needs. A perfect example of how this fact impacts banks is Shanghai’s robot bank, that opened a few days ago in China. Although finely tuned to function fully automated, human-free, and process requests in record time, the bank is low on customers, who appear rather ambivalent. One might infer that while no human interaction might sound like a good idea, sometimes it is an experience that people want, even if in small doses.
People also expect an easy interaction throughout all channels, want to enjoy user friendly and intuitive experiences, and if brands don’t deliver, be sure that everyone will soon find out on social media. One way to solve this is to strive to create experiences that are an extension of customers’ regular lifestyle as much as possible – for instance banks could ask for biometric verification instead of multiple passwords, and a mobile phone-based authentication code instead of a physical token-generated password.
Finding Your Roadblocks
Clients make transactions in order to solve specific problems and no one wants those transaction to be time-consuming or frustrating. From your clients’ point of view, the least friction at each stage of the transaction, the better their experience will be. Ultimately, you either make it easy for your customers, or they’ll find someone else who’ll make it easier for them.
Traditionally, the points of friction on a customer journey are identified by asking customers for their feedback, observing their engagement and mapping the customer journey etc. Now you can do that in record time, and more intuitively, with Effort Assessment Score (EAS). This tool measures the friction experienced by your customers at every level of interaction with your company, determines if improving it should be a priority or not and how it impacts your business, and finally, it delivers actionable recommendations to improve customer experience on key pain points. EAS is based on a scientifically validated model that integrates advanced methods to assess conscious deliberation and non-conscious associations.
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