With all the features that they have, SaaS products can often be complex. And customers might find themselves doing a lot to get more out of that product. Your startup business doesn’t actually want that.
As such, you need to put on the effort to, well, reduce customer effort. However, the next question is how do you pull that off? Let’s dive in and discover the solution with Virtua Solutions’ help.
Why Reducing Customer Effort Matters For Your Startup Business
Okay, this might seem like an obvious one. But reducing customer effort can impact your startup business in various ways. Understanding that impact helps you know what to do to achieve your customers’ desired results.
Improving The Customer Experience.
Customer effort has the biggest effect on the overall experience of using your product. If people struggle getting your SaaS product to work the way they want to, they get a negative impression of it. When that happens, it can be hard to make them delighted again.
On the other hand, reducing their effort from the start helps generate a positive experience. Here, you won’t even have to do a lot to get them making the next step, such as increasing their usage time. That initial impression already convinces them that they can succeed with your product.
Strengthening Customer Loyalty
Reducing customer effort also helps build the loyalty of your patrons. When they see that you have made the work easy for them, people know that you are ready to take care of them. With that, they have all the more reasons to stay.
But it goes far beyond just retaining your current customers. These loyal customers are also ready to endorse your product to others. And often, the first thing they use to convince their peers is the ease of operating your service. That can often be a surprisingly powerful motivator for others to try the recommendation.
It Helps Your Team Too
Surprisingly, reducing customer effort also helps remove a lot of burden from your team. When customers struggle with even minor tasks, they often have to rely on your support team. But this can swamp the latter with too much work.
By reducing customer effort, you also reduce their need to reach out to support agents. In turn, your agents can focus on more pressing matters. They also feel more relaxed since they don’t have that extra load.
Understanding Customer Effort
Of course, to reduce customer effort, you need to understand exactly how much your customers are exerting. This is where the aptly named customer effort score comes into play. This metric gives you a numeric value on the work patrons have to do when engaging with your startup company.
The metric was introduced in 2010 as a means for companies to determine the overall satisfaction of customers. Marketing research firm Gartner noted in its study that 96% of customers who go through a high effort service end up becoming disloyal. With that, having a clear picture of the effort they make helps you better avoid this problem.
For all its impact, measuring customer effort score is surprisingly simple. Here, you only need customers to answer a two-question survey. These questions are:
- To what extent do you agree with this statement? The company made it easy for me to handle an issue.
- Explain why you gave the above score.
In the first question, customers rate the company a score from 1 to 7, with 1 being strongly disagree and 7 strongly agree. By tracking the trend in the responses, you can have an idea of the overall perception of your brand. From there, you can determine if your customer effort reduction strategies are working.
As for the second question, customers can give a detailed explanation of their choice. Note that this second question is optional. However, it can provide you with a wealth of information. For instance, it can help you pinpoint areas where customers might struggle.
How Your Startup Business Can Reduce Customer Effort
Reducing customer effort isn’t just about resolving the issues that your customers put forward. Instead, you would want to approach it in a more holistic manner. Remember that even simple matters can affect the work that customers have to do.
Thus, you would want to know the pain points that your customers are encountering. To get more of that, you should time your CES surveys right. Some of the moments to do this include:
- After the customer receives support
- After a customer converts from a trial to a paid version
- After customers accomplish a goal
Since these are the moments when customers often do a lot of work, they become more willing to respond to the survey. That gives you plenty of information to rely on. Use all the channels at your disposal to gather more details for your strategy.
Helping Your Team And Customers Get The Information They need
Of course, your team needs access to all this wealth of information to respond. Thus, you would want to make it easy for them to get it whenever they need. Create a company-specific resource center that they can look up as needed. Here, it would be a good idea to separate it by departments.
Virtua Solutions can help you ensure that this resource center and your customer-facing knowledge base are up to date and working properly. We can also help you develop content that best suits each audience. With that, both sides can better resolve issues with the right information.
Collect And Understand Context
One of the most frustrating situations for customers is when they have to repeat all the information they provide to every new agent they encounter. That causes them to double or even triple the effort reaching out to you. To avoid that, you need to have a good idea of the context behind the customer engagement.
This is where diligent recording of the initial information provided becomes vital. Each support team member should be ready to hand this information over before transferring the customer to the next agent. And if they provide new info, the agent handling the customer at the moment should put it in the proper context. That way, customers can go through the process faster.
Let Us Help Your Startup Business Make Everything Effortless
Often, in the effort to lessen customer effort, your startup business will need extra hands. Virtua Solutions is ready to give that to you. With our extensive customer support and success services, we can help you guide your patrons towards the right path. Contact us today and let’s give your customers more.