The Connection Between Customer Effort and Active Listening
In today’s fast-paced world, customer experience has become a crucial factor in determining the success of any business, whether it’s a retail store, a software company, or a healthcare organization. A critical aspect of customer experience is customer effort.
Customer effort refers to the amount of effort a customer has to put in to achieve their desired outcome when interacting with a company. The less effort required, the better the experience. For healthcare providers, clinical directors, and university administrators, this translates to the ease of finding key information and accessing support to optimize their use of EHR software.
Solutions providers like Medicat reduce customer effort by leaning into active listening. Lauren Pragoff, Medicat’s Chief Customer Officer, is a huge proponent of focusing on active listening to resolve customer issues efficiently and effectively.
In a recent podcast interview with J.D. Power, Pragoff remarked:
“I think active listening, at the end of the day, is the most important skill for a customer service representative to get right. Without active listening, you are at a much greater risk of misdiagnosing the customer’s issue, missing out on important clues (possibly for an upsell or cross-sell opportunity), and having the customer repeat themselves. So, making sure that you’re really listening to what the customer is saying leads to all of the good things we want from a customer interaction.”
Our team actively listens to each customer’s concerns or questions through our online ticketing system, over the phone, or during educational workshops and webinars. We also use scalable methods like Voice of Customer Surveys to listen to our customers holistically. By deeply understanding the importance of minimizing customer effort within the college health environment, we’re able to alleviate pain points and reduce the time and effort it takes to resolve challenges our customers face.
When you need a question answered, you need it answered now (and without having to jump through hoops to get it). That’s why we’ve developed a support strategy that minimizes customer effort, therefore improving the overall user and patient experience.
Interested in learning more about the importance of customer effort and how it impacts your clinic’s day-to-day operations and efficiency? Listen to the podcast below, featuring Lauren Pragoff’s powerful insights: