Gartner says that reducing customer effort can reduce costs by 37% and induce customers to spend 88% more.
How many of you are focused on achieving these kinds of business results?
As a B2B seller, how much of a priority is reducing your customers’ effort and making it easier to do business with?
As a B2B buyer, how important is it that your suppliers reduce your effort to purchase from them?
We would love to know via a short survey how you’re prioritizing the reduction of customer effort. We’re happy to share a summary of the results to all who participate.
Why is this important?
We (Jeb Dasteel and Curtis Bingham, doing independent research) have come to the realization that customer loyalty is simply the wrong thing to be measuring . It is increasingly very hard to correlate loyalty metrics with business results . It doesn’t measure actual customer behavior—and therefore it is not a true predictor of desired outcomes.
And even more important, loyalty is tenuous at best if the customer effort, or burden placed on your customers, creates no intrinsic value for them. If every customer interaction is pure friction, bureaucracy, process, or wasted time, there can never be real loyalty.
Effective predictors require a direct line of sight to business outcomes: greater revenue, decreased costs, or risks mitigated. We have seen many customer executives fail in their ability to demonstrate tangible business impact on the enterprise. This is a partial explanation as to why the average tenure of the chief customer officer (CCO) is only 27 months, and the CMO is only slightly better.
What should you be measuring instead?
In numerous interviews conducted over the past six months with extremely successful chief marketing officers and chief customer officers, we’ve developed some provocative new customer strategies anchored by seven leading indicators of profit/revenue growth —and best practices-oriented programs to move the needle for each that you can use to create real value for your CEO and your business.
Customer Effort is our leading indicator #1 . It is crucially important to your customer strategy. Reducing customer effort will positively give you stronger top-line and bottom-line results than yesterday’s focus on customer loyalty metrics.
We are hoping to even better understand how leading companies are prioritizing reducing customer effort and would love your insight. Can you take three minutes and participate in this survey?
Thank you!
Curtis Bingham
Founder & CEO, Chief Customer Officer Council
Jeb Dasteel
Chief Customer Officer, Oracle