Customer Effort Score Explained, and How Banks and Credit Unions Can Enhance it

Customer Effort Score Explained, and How Banks and Credit Unions Can Enhance it

As a bank or credit union, your customers depend on you for their high-value financial needs, so you want them to be able to access your appointment scheduling channels as easily as possible in order to drive that additional revenue to your organization. In this blog post, we will discuss how you can improve your Customer Effort Score (CES), simplifying communication processes to help drive more revenue to your organization and continue growing your business.


Ready to discover how your walk-in appointment processes can be enhanced? Schedule a customer effort assessment.


What is the Customer Effort Score?

The Customer Effort Score (CES) is a new metric that is becoming increasingly important to consider in customer-facing businesses that rely on positive customer experience to drive revenue, especially vital in financial services. Essentially, it is a method of measuring customer service satisfaction to help organizations build loyalty by reducing the effort it takes to complete a service request. To measure it, customers are asked a series of simple questions related to how easy it is to perform actions with your organization. Taken as a whole, their responses can provide you with a quantitative value to work with in order to improve upon the experience your organization provides.

Friction points in the customer journey that are affecting your organization’s Customer Effort Score

As an appointment driven business, you rely on customers to schedule and ultimately show up for appointments with your organization. There are typically a variety of ways in which customers can get in touch with your organization, which is exactly what you want as it provides greater convenience. However, issues can arise when these methods of communication require an excess of effort for the customer and create barriers along the customer journey. Below we’ve outlined three aspects of the customer journey that have been found to pose the most significant barriers and may be up for improvement when looking to boost your organization’s CES.

Lengthy Call Handle Time

Did you know 80% of customers drop off the line when placed on hold for over 1 minute to schedule an appointment? Your customers’ time is valuable and by increasing efficiencies and reducing hold and call handling time when a customer calls into your contact center to schedule an appointment, you reduce the effort it takes to make the appointment. and significantly improve your organization’s CES. Providing contact center reps with tools to simplify the booking process will increase appointments at your organization and ultimately your branch revenue.

Branch Traffic Wait Time

Walk-in branch service requests are a convenient point of contact for many customers and a serious revenue driver for many businesses. However, branch traffic volume can be unpredictable, with unexpected influxes leaving your customers waiting and your staff overwhelmed. To reduce the sense of effort a customer feels while waiting in a service queue, it’s vital to have tools in place that remove frustrations like uncertain wait times and accessible alternatives. By providing your customers with a clear expectation of when a representative will be able to see them and how long it will take, you provide them with more freedom and let them know that their business is appreciated.

Reviewing customer history

Existing customers want to be remembered and have their loyalty to your brand acknowledged, so having a solution in place that is capable of capturing, organizing and storing their history, preferences and other pertinent information with your organization is vital to providing them with the personal touch they’re looking for. By saving customers from having to input their information at every touchpoint, you display to them that they are highly valued and more than simply a number in a system, leading to an increase in your business’ CES along with greater client retention.

How an Enterprise Appointment Management Solution can help address these customer pains and enhance your CES

Many of the issues that could be affecting the Customer Effort Score in your organization are an easy fix with the right solution. As an appointment driven business, streamlining the scheduling process is key to addressing issues that may be affecting your score. This is where an appointment management solution comes in.

Streamline the call center process

Implementing an integrated appointment management solution into your organization’s call center can streamline the appointment scheduling process and subsequently reduce both initial hold and call handling times. This will enhance operational efficiencies in your organization, allowing call center representatives to process more calls per day and drive more business to your branch locations. Additionally, it will boost your Customer Effort Score with a smooth and effortless call process that greatly reduces the time your customers have to dedicate to schedule an appointment.

Enhance the walk-in experience for your customers

With the often disruptive nature of walk-in appointments, managing the scheduling system to help streamline the experience for both your customers and customer-facing advisors is key to removing frustrations. One method by which you can utilize an appointment management solution to improve the walk-in appointment experience is by linking it with a lobby management solution. This will assist in managing the walk-in traffic at your branch locations while updating customers with real-time advisor availability, allowing them to better manage the time they spend waiting for their appointment and reducing service abandonment.

Create a personalized experience for your customers

When customers are not recognized and consistently required to review their history with your organization at each touchpoint, they are missing out on the personal touch they crave, and your organization is missing out on key opportunities to improve its Customer Effort Score. With an integrated appointment management solution, your organization will be able to record customer information on a single integrated platform that is accessible by all customer-facing staff, ensuring that your customers receive a more personalized experience.

Streamline the customer journey across all channels to drive new business and increase revenue with Coconut Software.

When customers start out their interaction with your organization through an effortlessly streamlined process, you are setting your organization up for success. With Coconut Software’s integrated appointment management solution, there are multiple implementations available to you that can help enhance your operational efficiencies along with your Customer Effort Score in order to increase business and drive more revenue to your branch locations.


What’s next?

Ready to discover how your walk-in appointment processes can be enhanced? Schedule a customer effort assessment.

Interested in learning how appointment scheduling can help your entire organization engage more efficiently and effectively with customers? Download our Customer Experience Whitepaper.

Ready to get started? Schedule a consultation today.


 

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