Four reasons to start benchmarking customer experience with effort metrics

Abigail Sims

August 17, 2021

Talk to a product expert

Picture this. You’re a dedicated customer experience (CX) leader at your company, committed to connecting with customers, reducing churn, and bringing out the best in employees and customers alike along the way. You’ve started to see positive results within the company—churn rates are down, loyalty is up, and operating costs are lower than ever—but you still feel a little lost. Are those results good or bad compared to other companies? Are your competitors three steps behind or lightyears ahead? 

This is a familiar quandary for many of our customers… And we do have a solution for you. As proponents of a low-effort approach to CX, we’ve implemented our own benchmarking metrics for customer effort. And those metrics are exactly what CX leaders need to be tracking in order to start benchmarking customer experience.

Don’t believe us? Here are four reasons to start benchmarking customer experience with effort metrics: 

#1 Access competitive industry analysis

When you start tracking your effort scores, you get on a fast track to insights about your company’s performance as compared to all your competitors. A robust conversation analysis tool will not only track your scores but those of the top performers in your industry. Compare and contrast your effort scores with theirs to determine where the standard for CX really stands in your industry—and how to exceed it. 

Tethr’s benchmarking feature shows you where you stand

#2 Monitor company performance over time

When you start benchmarking customer experience utilizing effort scores, you give yourself (and your team) a record of past performance to measure future success against. By keeping a solid track record of effort scores over time, you can actually graph the customer experience over time as it improves. If an agent isn’t keeping up, or a particular department is struggling, you can track those stats against past stats instantly. How’s that for accountability? 

#3 Track ongoing improvement as goals shift & change

With effort benchmarking, you can now set goals and track improvement in a scalable way for your team. In the below screencap, you can see how easy it is to track individual effort-centric CX elements like frustration, confusion, missed expectations, and more. These can be further segmented according to your focus. Maybe you’re aiming for average first—but once you’ve made it to the black line (average), it’s time to target the green (top 25%). 

benchmarking-customer-experience-img2

Benchmarking customer experience

Download Recession-Proof Ebook

#4 Identify & achieve goals for serious ROI

A powerful tool for benchmarking customer effort is essential to achieving some of the biggest goals for CX leaders. If you need to identify effort drivers, reduce cost of service, and increase customer loyalty, a systematic benchmarking system based on effort metrics like AIS and TEI makes it easy to identify goals and take the steps to get there. With a strong benchmarking tool, you’ll be able to set competitive targets and achieve them for some serious ROI.

These are just a few of the reasons benchmarking customer experience with effort metrics (like ours!) is now an essential part of any CX strategy. Effort reduction is the key to so much in the CX world, so it only makes sense to invest in a tool that enables you to get serious about measuring it. 

To learn more about our benchmarking feature, check out this informative video by Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna. Ready to find out how you stack up to the competition? Request a demo today.

Jump to:

Most popular articles