Reducing Customer Effort

What is customer effort?  To me, customer effort is the measure of how difficult it is for customers to obtain the information they need in order to be successful with a company or a specific product.  Have you ever done business with a company that does not value customer effort?  I have and it was the most frustrating, belittling experience yet.  This said company is a subscription box service that provides monthly coffee samples.  Now, this service was great for a few months until I realized how expensive it was getting, and the coffee wasn’t anything special.  I tried to cancel my subscription and was met with the spartan army front line of defense.  There was no webpage to visit, no link to click to cancel anything, only an email address. I sent emails to support and never heard back.  A few weeks went by and I was charged again for another box of coffee I didn’t want.  After absolutely harassing this company, they finally processed my cancelation.  I have never felt more helpless, more unimportant or more small than I did trying to get out of this service.  If the company had provided a clear pathway where I could have taken care of this myself, I would have felt better, and might have even stayed a few extra months, knowing I could cancel anytime.

I never want anyone to go through an experience like that with any company they do business with, which is why I am so glad I work for drchrono.

drchrono firmly believes, and has taken the steps necessary, to reduce customer effort.  We believe your time is valuable, and if you need anything at all, you shouldn’t have to spend hours to figure it out, nor have an engineering degree to get in touch with us or to find pertinent information from our Help Center.  An example of reducing customer effort is our new dashboard.  Upon logging into your account, you are presented with a multitude of helpful facts about your account.  By including this information from the get go, you don’t even have to dig through the system to find out how many faxes you have left for example, or to view your medical billing.  We have also implemented the use of Inbenta, a smart search, to help pull relevant articles for our customers before submitting a support ticket.  For the first time, we are utilizing information bubbles to explain certain new features, and this is just the beginning.  We believe in arming our customers with all the knowledge they need to optimally run our software.  Lastly, and what has turned out to be a hit of a feature, is we provide an explanation and steps to fix, denied claims.  Our customer service team are all product experts, but we decided not to stop there.  Our goal is to make all of our customers product experts as well, because product knowledge is power.  Product knowledge is the key to keeping customers happy.  Product knowledge is crucial from a company standpoint, because without happy, knowledgeable customers, what do you have?

No one should ever feel belittled, helpless, or inferior when dealing with a company.  At drchrono we live this ideal and strive to provide the most comprehensive service experience possible.  We believe in reducing customer effort to obtain the information necessary to be an expert with our software.