Customer Productivity
The concept behind customer productivity is simple.How can your products and services make your customers more productive?
Here are some live examples of enhancing customer productivity:- 40% time saving during ATM transaction of a leading bank in India: At the ATM, you can register your most frequently used cash withdrawal amount along with the account and preferred language as “MyFavourite”. Thereafter, to withdraw the same amount, you only need to enter your PIN, select “MyFavourite”, and collect the cash. This reduces the number of screens you have to go through from 9 to 5, thus saving 40% of your time.
- Sequential boarding in a leading airline saves time, effort & hassles for passengers: When you board the aircraft, passengers form a queue in random order. Passengers seated in the earlier rows who board first, load their hand luggage in the overhead compartment and thus blocking the pathway for other customers. This increasing the queue and boarding time for passengers and the overall boarding time for the airline. This airline ensures that passengers seated in rows 16 to 30 board first followed by rows 1 to 15.
- Automatic muting of TV in hotel room when phone line is used: A leading 5 star hotel chain has installed a simple automation in the room that mutes the TV volume when the phone line in the room is being used. Usually, guests scramble for their TV remotes when the phone rings!
Customer Effort and Customer Productivity
Customer Effort is a new concept introduced through HBR article Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers, which aims at reducing the effort of customer to use a product or service. Research suggests Customer Effort has stronger correlation to repurchase and increasing spending than C-Sat and NPS.
Customer Productivity is a ratio of outputs derived by customers and inputs of customers. Outputs include goods & services purchased, tangible & intangible value and psychological benefits. Inputs include time, effort and money spent by customer.
Customer Effort reduction and Customer Productivity enhancement have many similarities. While the former aims to reduce the inputs spent by customer, the latter goes one step further to increase customer’s outputs. It aims to make the customer more productive in her professional or personal life by value enhancement.
For example, the effort spent in two separate queues to buy tickets & munchies for the multiplex customer can be reduced. One can further consider providing subtitles in the film that will enhance value and enrich customer’s experience!
Why is customer productivity assuming importance?
- We are living in an era of ‘Split Customer Loyalty‘. With explosion in choices, awareness and access to information, customers are hardly loyal or emotionally bonded to a brand for a long duration. 80 % of all satisfied customers are willing to experiment with new products/services of competitors. So their loyalty is short lived. They are willing to try anything new that’s easy and makes them efficient.
- Customers have their own measures of productivity. We are hardly exposed to these measures. In fact, we only see fragmented portions of customer’s life, when she interacts with our touch points.
- With explosion of technology and technology driven products, the share of time and attention that we get from customer for our products/services has drastically reduced. Think of the days when a whole family shared one transistor and now when everyone has more than 2 audio visual entertainment devices.
- Awareness among customers to attack their productivity hackers is good enough a deterrent to buy or use your product/service
How can we help you?
We facilitate a systematic study to understand opportunities for enhancing your customer’s productivity in the products and services you offer covering all channels and touch-points.
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