Frame AI Blog

When Things Go Well…

Think of some of your favorite companies. What keeps you coming back?

Big shout out to Chewy. I recently changed my shipping address but then saw an email confirmation indicating my auto-ship order for my dog Chief’s food was en route to my old address. A quick chat with Ross later, and another bag was on its way to me at no extra charge or hassle. 

When Things Go Poorly…

Now think about companies you’ve turned your back on. 

I experienced a major service failure with an event software company ( I won’t name names). Days before a big event, calendar invites hadn’t been automatically emailed to RSVPs as expected. I knew this was going to hurt our live attendance rate. 

The stakes for customer experience are only getting higher. According to Zendesk, 61% of customers would now defect to a competitor after just one bad experience. That’s a 22% jump from the previous year. Make it two negative experiences, and 76% of customers are ready to say goodbye.

For many companies, Support interactions represent a precious few opportunities to develop a human connection with customers - and it’s critical to set the right tone with what you say and do.

We recently shared 5 data-backed tips for what to say in Support interactions. Here, we highlight 5 everyday actions Support agents take that can make a world of difference. We analyzed millions of Support cases to examine their impact on everything from customer satisfaction to case re-open rates. Here are 5 things that customer whisperers *do. *

For many businesses, Support interactions represent the only human interaction they have with their customers.

According to Zendesk, 78% of senior company leaders agree that support agents play a vital role in customer retention. Needless to say, it’s critical to make the right impression in these interactions and put your best foot forward (vs. foot-in-mouth.)

Here, we’ve made some observations about what to say that will help you crush it no matter what kinds of cases get thrown your way based on the millions of Support cases we analyze.

Have you ever been sent a promo code as a pre-emptive apology for an order snafu? Received a proactive message about a CRM glitch with a plan to make your life easier in the meantime? Gotten quick compensation for a flight delay?

Happy customers tend to stick around, grow, and publicly advocate for your business. Unhappy customers often churn and can deter others from doing business with you. According to Temkin, after a poor experience, 22% of customers reduced spend and 19% terminated their relationship with the company entirely. According to Zendesk, 54% of customers share bad experiences with more than five people. It’s impossible to overstate the value of customer advocacy and the cost of vocal detractors.

CX teams measure team effort to understand and manage their overall cost of serving customers and to cultivate happy and engaged teams that play a starring role in great customer experiences. Team effort can also make a huge difference in popular metrics like employee promoter scores (“EPS”), quality assurance (“QA”), and operational metrics like case resolution times and escalation rates. When customer-facing employees’ jobs are harder than they need to be, CX teams often see high turnover rates and low EPS scores, lower QA scores, more escalations, and delays in case resolution times — the list goes on. And each of these unfortunate side effects increases your cost of service and creates stubborn obstacles that stand in the way of improving customer experience.

Why Measure Team Effort?

Team effort is the collective amount of time that customer-facing teams allocate to supporting your customer experience.

Customer effort is a mix of customers’ subjective feelings and what they objectively experience during interactions with your business. Measuring and reducing customer effort is a top priority of many CX organizations and with good reason.

Last week, we were excited to contribute to the conversation at CCW Digital’s online conference, Customer Experience Challenges, Trends, and Innovations. In case you missed it, we’ve recapped our session, Getting to Frictionless CX, below. Our session featured Dexter Horthy, VP Customer Success & Solution Engineering at Replicated, Frame AI CEO & Co-Founder George Davis, and Matt Wujciak, Market Research Analyst at Customer Management Practice.

We recently discussed why measuring customer effort is important and how it’s different from surveying customer effort. This post introduces a five-step framework to help you think through how to measure customer effort using organic customer feedback and AI.