What is Customer Effort Score and Why Does it Matter for Your Small Business?

Transcription:

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Joseph, thanks so much for joining on the show.

Joseph Michelli:
Well, thanks for having me, Jim.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure. Why is customer ease something that we should be paying more attention to?

Joseph Michelli:
I think we believe that we need to wow our customers and no doubt that’s in there somewhere, but if you look at the literature, wowing doesn’t get you as much as you think, particularly if you could down on some more practical things, rather than just trying to give away the farm in order to cause customers to go, “That’s a lot more than I expected.”

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yeah. Yeah. Drill down, tell us some of the things that businesses should focus on.

Joseph Michelli:
I think if you start every day saying, “How can I make this experience easier for my customers?” That would be the most remarkable thing. If all you obsessed about was how to make the world easier for your customers and I think the brands that do that, start to think about how do we make it easier at arrival as soon as they show up on our website or on our phone, or…

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure.

Joseph Michelli:
When they actually walk in the door of our business and then all of the other important moments that they remember most during their journey, how do we make it easier? As they’re going from one state of being to another state of being. Once they’ve bought the product into the service side of the business, for example. And the more we just say, let’s reduce complexity, let’s not add more signs and more fluff to the experience. Let’s really make it as optimally efficient as possible.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure. And you say in your article, which was a great piece, I highly recommend everybody goes out and reads it in its entirety. But you talk about the fact that it’s not just offering free shipping to a customer, right? That doesn’t necessarily, it’s not really what you’re talking about. Right?

Joseph Michelli:
Right. I think that you can only free your way into so much of love from the customer’s perspective. And most of the empiric literature says it really doesn’t buy a lot of loyalty. Now there’s no doubt you got to meet customer expectations, there’s no doubt about that. If you can exceed them slightly, that’s great but sometimes we in our effort to, wow, really try to go over the top with these experiences and create these wow stories, right? Most of those wow stories are not sustainable. They don’t make for a great business. And after a while, customers come to expect that as the next service level.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Right.

Joseph Michelli:
And now you got to compete against that. I’m constantly just saying, “Think about what makes the life of your customer easier.”

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure.

Joseph Michelli:
How can you be an easier business to do business with.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yep.

Joseph Michelli:
And if you keep that front end center, you start to look at, well, “We’ve add four steps here when we can do it in two.”

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Right.

Joseph Michelli:
We put 15 signs up that actually creates more effort. And this is kind of what we would call passive effort on the part of their customer, right? Cognitive effort. I have to sort through your complex forms, right? Yeah. And that’s a form of effort.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right.

Joseph Michelli:
Make it easy for me. Make it so I can read It.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right. Many times I’ll want to purchase a product that I see online on Facebook or now TikTok or what have you, and they put me through this series of surveys, “And what did you think about it?” This is before I can even buy it. And then when I buy it, I’ve got to do all of these different form fills just to acquire it halfway through. I’m like, “You know what? I don’t want it that bad, I just don’t have time for this.” Or something else will come my way that I’m sorry, I’ll get back to it, and I don’t. When at the end of the day, if I’m ready to buy, I should be able to go click. I just bought it, right? Without having to jump through all these hoops.

Joseph Michelli:
And if I am going to solicit feedback from you to determine whether or not it was easy or not, why not ask, “How easy was it for you to purchase with me today?”

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right.

Joseph Michelli:
On scale of one to five and if it’s not particularly easy, then we have to go back and look at, what are we doing to put the customer through. And it’s not just our customers, it’s our employees too. A recent study suggested that there are normally 54 actions a new hire has to go through from the time they start, they get hired to the job, to the first day of starting. These are things like screenings and badges and all kinds of steps they have to take. What can we do to reduce the amount of effort we put on people once we’ve said welcome to the family? before they can actually be members of that Family.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yeah. That’s very good, that’s a very good point. And you’ve gotten the attorneys now involved in all of this. Every visit to the attorneys, oh, you better have them fill this form out. You better have them do that. You better have, them sit with this person, you better have them sit with that person. I agree with you, it gets crazy after a while to the point that they feel like they’ve gone through a meeting with the courts or something. Right?

Joseph Michelli:
And all due respect to attorneys, we’re writing agreements and contracts and rules for people. Not for other lawyers who speak a certain kind of language that most of us just don’t speak and thinking through it and putting it on your attorneys, how do we make this easier for people to do business with? We don’t want to put ourselves aside stray of the law or outside of the bounds of what’s safe for our business, but must we make this Latinate and complex and non English? And I think all of that is just part and parcel of the psychology that says, if you don’t make it easy, somebody else will. And the easiest person to do business with is often going to win the race, above anything else because you’ve thought about me and you’ve thought about how to enable me to engage your business on my terms instead of yours.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure. We have all spent more money on products and services to your point because of the ease of doing business. It wasn’t a financial decision at that point in time. It was just a, “I want to get in, I want to get out, I don’t mind spending a little bit more money to do that.” But it’s just the ease of doing business. Obviously you look at a company like 7/11 or Quick Trip, or any of those other companies that will charge you a lot more for the product because you can get in and you can get out with no hassle, right?

Joseph Michelli:
When it comes to fuel, for example, there is a whole trend now of companies that are delivering gas to your location instead of…

Jim Fitzpatrick:
I Have heard. Yep.

Joseph Michelli:
You use the Uberized app, they’ll deliver gas to you. And it’s really kind of a wonderful world, right? Because they’re providing you gas at the same cost it would be to go to a convenience store. But how convenient it is for you to have to go when they can come to you and they can keep the cost competitive because they don’t have the brick and mortar costs associated with owning a convenience store.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right.

Joseph Michelli:
And then they often will write a little personalized note and wash your windows as a throwback to the human elements of comfort and ease that are in my dad’s generation of gas stations.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right. Your dad’s generation, I remember when they gave a whole set of glasses away at 32 cents a gallon and wow, I’m really dating myself right now. Of course I wasn’t a driving.

Joseph Michelli:
I’m a 50 cents a gallon guy if those days would matter.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s great. That’s great. That’s great. And, but nevertheless, you’re right. And let me ask you this, how much of an impact has the last two years had in all of this? When customers do want convenience, they do want an ease of doing business with a particular company or maybe a restaurant that says, “Hey, we’ll bring it to you. We’ll make it really easy to shop our menu or to review our menu or what have you, and one pay and we’ll get you your food in no time at all.” Has the pandemic played a role in this?

Joseph Michelli:
Yeah. There are people like me who weren’t necessarily thinking that we wanted the ease of having somebody deliver our groceries. We weren’t jumping onto the Instacart craze before the pandemic, but then when there wasn’t another option, then suddenly we became accustomed to the convenience of not necessarily having to go into the store, do our own shopping for ourselves. We could pick it up curbside or have it delivered. And I think it’s changed our sense of, do I really need to do that? Really thinking about where do I want to spend my time? Is it in the grocery aisle? Or do I want to pay a little premium there and spend a little more time over here? It is a reset, I think on purposefulness. And challenging ourselves is that really worth my investment of time and energy.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right. Look at these grocery stores that have made these tremendous investments in self checkout centers. I say they’ve made an investment, of course they’re saving on having a salaried employee do that. But I haven’t figured out whether that’s a convenience or if that’s an inconvenience because now I’m doing all of the grocery scanning, right? Versus just putting it on the conveyor belt and having someone else do it. But it’s funny because when I go to the store with my wife, she’ll say, “Well, look, let’s just go over a here. This is a huge convenience. We’ll just be able to get in and out of here. We don’t have to wait on as long a line and what have you.” And I’m thinking to myself, wow. They just took somebody out of that, that was doing it for us and now here’s my wife seeing this as more of a convenience than an inconvenience.

Joseph Michelli:
Well, and I think we’re taking that next step, which is Amazon go, right?

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right.

Joseph Michelli:
You just go in, you grab and you go and all of the beacons and all the AI is picking up what you just removed from the shelf.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Right.

Joseph Michelli:
And it’s going into your cart online, your cloud cart and you’re being for it as you walk out the door.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right.

Joseph Michelli:
What this means from a labor perspective, there’s mixed bags, I think their point is well taken. The great brands are bailing people when people are needed, but they’re also enabling us not to have to go through a person to get our needs met. We have this choice point of, “Do I opt human or do I opt automation?” And I’m given that choice and for the most part, if its routine tasks that are very convenient, I’m very willing to expedite things then having to require another person, potentially it elevates the experience, but also potentially slow it down.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right. That’s right. And we see Carvana with those vroom commercials. Everybody has seen those commercials where somebody no longer has to go to a dealership to buy a vehicle. They just pick up their phone or go on their laptop or their tablet in the comfort of their own home and lo and behold, the vehicle just pulls right up to your driveway gets dropped off. And somebody, some friendly young chap gets out and says, okay, “Sign the delivery receipt here.” And you’ve got your new car or in this case, your pre-owned vehicle waiting for you in the driveway. Right?

Joseph Michelli:
These are challenges for us. How do we make it easier? How do we make it easier? And then how do we make it cost of effective? Where can we reduce costs on one side of the equation so that we can enable the facilitation of some of these amazing convenience offerings that customers are coming to expect? And the marketplace is changing the dynamic for us.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right. You gave three different tips to get the most out of asking customers about their effort. Talk to us about that.

Joseph Michelli:
I think the first and foremost is, you have to ask and you have to ask in a way that’s very easy itself. Right? And if you determine that there is any kind of, in a zero to five scale, if it’s very difficult for me to do business with, we know from research, it’s not likely I’m going to repurchase from you again. And I certainly am not going to spend a lot more money with you over time. If we get an indicator that we are having some problems with effort, we need to go back to root cause, right? And we need to figure out what is getting in the way. We need to step in the shoes of our customer, look at it from their side of the counter, see what they’re seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, doing, touching, and then be able to remove some of that complexity. And if we don’t, then the customers will go to places where they can get the same product at a reasonably similar price without having to exert the effort.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right. That’s right. Too many business owners, and I know cause I owned a couple of different businesses, we don’t shop our own businesses, right? Sometimes we, as the owners of the company or the leaders of the company, we don’t know firsthand what that journey is, that purchase journey is in our own businesses. Right? We just assume, “Oh, we’ve got the information on there on our website or in our showrooms or in our businesses and it really shouldn’t be difficult.” But when was the last time we really did business with our own business to learn firsthand what that experience is like, right?

Joseph Michelli:
Oh my goodness. It’s such a great tip. And I made a lot of money as a consultant going into board rooms with something that I know is very complex to order on, a company’s website and then handing this challenge to everyone in the boardroom and say, “I want you to purchase this item without this quality, with this feature delivered by this date.” Right? Or whatever the complex formula is. And you’ll often see people can’t even purchase that item who are actual representatives of the board of that company. I think every one of us has an opportunity to step into it. At Starbucks, we have something called the customer walk. Every day there is a barista who goes out into the parking lot and walks as if they’re a customer walks. All those steps, looks at pastry case from the customer side of the vantage point where you can the smudges before, where you see the pastry. Whereas on the other side, if we spend our whole day from that side of the counter, we’re seeing the pastry before we see the glass and often don’t even see the smudges.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s a good point.

Joseph Michelli:
I think it is a conscious process of stepping into the shoes of your customer and looking for the inefficiencies of pain points. And I’ll just end with that one for me, at least from Starbucks, one of the things we found early, early on was the big pain point was having to wait in line to pay. Guess what? They created their own simple technology, 2D scanner at the cash register that was kind of the beginning of being able to do mobile pay at scale. And from there they’ve done mobile ordering and all the other bills and whistles but it starts with somebody saying, “Can we make this easier on customers who are standing in line to pull cash out of their pocket.”

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right. That’s right. And you’re so right about that. And sometimes it’s just that simple. It’s not a price situation, it’s not adding more people per say, to the payroll. It’s not even a bigger, brighter, new store. Sometimes times its just simple as a technology or even taking away a technology that may get in the way, if it’s a survey or, or another form fill or something like that. Right? It’s important, I think that all small business owners and big business owners take a close look at that purchase journey and see what your customers go through. And I’m sure that’s exactly what they did at Starbucks. Right? Probably took some regional manager or leader in the company to go, “Wait a minute, I just went to Starbucks and they didn’t knew who I was in that particular store. And here’s what I found” and right?

Joseph Michelli:
And it’s also on the employees side, Starbucks for a long time, they would do their shake and tea and they would say something like “Shake it for 15 seconds.” Right? And people’s perspective on what 15 seconds is varies as much as 10 seconds.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right. I can see that.

Joseph Michelli:
Instruction added complexity and so if you say shake it five times now we’re approximating 15 seconds, and that’s a lot easier for people to track than a more complex concept of how much time you have to shake it for. I think it’s everything we do, we just have to ask, “Can we make this easier? Can we make what we just wrote clearer? Can I say it in a way that people can understand better?”

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right.

Joseph Michelli:
Because it not, people who do those things are just drawing people to them in their humanity and their compassion.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Hey, we are showing right now all of the books on the screen that you have written. They are all incredible books that we highly recommend for our viewers to get a hold of. If you care about your business, you care about your customer, you want to know the winning success formula of these companies. Joseph has really drilled down and kind of uncovered how these companies succeed with today’s demanding customers and consumers out there. But I know Joseph, you’re probably working on a book right now. Maybe you don’t want to talk about it, but certainly we want to have you back when you’re ready to say, “Okay, here’s either the next company or the next topic that we want to share with your viewers.” I want to thank you so much for joining us here on the show. Our viewers and subscribers get so much out of your visit. Joseph Michelli CEO of Michelli Experience and customer experience expert, hopefully by the way, are you now back speaking because of, COVID in our rear view mirror?

Joseph Michelli:
Next week I in three different cities, I’ll be in Orange County and then Philadelphia and then Miami all in the same week. So the world is changing.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That is fantastic for business owners, looking for an awesome speaker. Look no further than the screen, right in front of you, this guy will make an audience really appreciate that they came to your conference or your meeting. Thank you so much, Joseph. Really appreciate it.

Joseph Michelli:
Thanks, Jim.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yep.