Are You Difficult to Work For?

Customer effort

There’s a lot of talk about how much effort a customer is required to put forth to complete some task with an organization. Whether it’s to buy a product, to get an issue resolved, or to do something else. There’s even a way to measure this effort, using the customer effort score.

If you’re not familiar with that, it’s a metric created by C.E.B., based on the following questions:

Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with the following statements about your service experience, overall:

• The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.
• It took less time than I expected to handle this issue.

C.E.B. made a discovery.  Service interactions are four times more likely to create disloyal customers than loyal customers.  From their site:

This is because 96% of customers who put forth high effort to resolve their issues are more disloyal.  Only 9% of those with low effort interactions are more disloyal. Creating low effort customer interactions is the clear goal for the service organization.

What about employee effort?

All this focus on customer effort got me thinking about the spillover effect between employees and customers. What about employee effort? How do we measure that? And how does that impact the customer experience?

I’m not talking about the (discretionary) effort that the employee puts into his or her work every day. I’m referring to the effort it takes an employee to do his job. I.e. are there processes that hinder their ability to do their jobs in an efficient way?

I started wondering…

• What’s keeping employees from delivering the great experience that your customers deserve?
• How can we simplify workflows and processes?
• How can we become easier to do business with – internally?
• How can we make it easier for employees to do what we ask them to do?
• What complexities, complications, and bureaucracy can we remove?
• How do we reduce effort for employees and then, ultimately, for customers?

When we make it difficult for employees to do their jobs, it translates to the experience they deliver for their customers.

It doesn’t matter if the task the employee is trying to do is not directly related to a customer.  The frustration that effort evokes will manifest itself in the employee-customer interaction somehow.

Why do we do this? Why do we hire people to fill a role or to do some job and then make it nearly impossible for them to succeed?

Making work easy

I have a few suggestions on how to turn things around for your employees, and ultimately, for the customer.

1. Walk in your employees’ shoes

To really understand the effort they must put forth every day, you have to walk in their shoes. To do this, create:

1. Employee journey maps, a subject about which Intradiem and I did a webinar,
2. Start your own undercover executive type program, where executives take on the role of the employee. What an eye opener that can be!

Once you understand the effort, you’ll uncover inefficiencies and be equipped to improve the process.

2. Pay attention to your employees

Listen and observe. Listen to what your employees are telling you. Watch how they work. If they say a process is painful or pointless, fix it. Don’t brush it aside.

If you get feedback, do something with it. If you ignore it, employees will resent you.

3. Listen to what customers are saying

Customers may provide feedback that their issues were not resolved promptly or properly.   Perhaps  they say employees seem hostile and unwilling to help.  Is this the employees fault or yours?

Perhaps this is due to processes set forth within the organization. Perhaps it’s due to inadequate tools or training. Perhaps there are other root causes that hinder the employee’s ability to support that customer in the manner in which he should.

4. Ensure employees have the tools

Clearly define their roles and set expectations. Make sure employees have the knowledge, skills, training, and resources to do the jobs you hired them to do. Let them deliver on what you’re expecting of them.

Without this, they’ll forge their own path and come up with their own solutions. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but they could end up needlessly spinning their wheels.

5. Clearly define what a great customer experience looks like

When employees are spinning their wheels, trying to hit some unclear target, the effort is extreme and unwarranted. Give them a clear target (customers) and help them understand how to get there.

6. Provide ongoing feedback

How does feedback reduce effort? The answer relates to #2. If they keep doing what they’re doing and are continuing to get the same (wrong/bad) results, that’s the definition of insanity. You don’t want to drive your employees crazy!

If they’re doing it wrong and continue to do so, what does that mean for the amount of effort they’re exuding? Giving employees feedback – and ongoing coaching – helps to guide them in the right direction. They will do the right things better.

7. Lose the script

While this seems like a solution that contradicts simplicity, the script can be the root of all evil. If employees stick to the script, they may not be listening to what customers are saying.

Do you want your staff to be flexible, personalizing the experience for the specific customer?  Forcing them to work within a script makes it more difficult to deliver a great experience.

8. Communication is key

I think a common thread throughout many of these items is communication, plain and simple. Listen to employees. Talk to employees.

The employee effort score

We know there’s a metric called the “Customer Effort Score”. Is there an “Employee Effort Score”? Not that I’m aware of, but why should that stop us from measuring and understanding the employee effort.

We should ask employees a variation of the CES questions; how about something like…

Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with the following statements:

• The company makes it easy for me to do my job.
• The company makes it easy for me to handle customer issues.
• The company makes it easy for me to deliver a great customer experience.

I’d include an open ended question.  Then employees can provide details about their responses and  offer up suggestions for improvements.

What else would you add?

Sometimes it’s just easier to sit around spinning your wheels than it is to move forward…but you never get anywhere ~ Susan Gale

If you enjoyed this post click here to have the next delivered to your inbox

Read another opinion

Image by LaurPhil

Annette first published this post on Intradiem.