Optimizes Customer Effort Score on the entire support service process that goes through multiple channels

transcosmos inc. (Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan; President and COO: Masataka Okuda) hereby announces that the company will release “CESMO,” its research and analytics service that constantly evaluates customer support experience from the customer’s perspective, in full scale. Building on its contact center business platform, the largest in Japan, and digital marketing business platform, as well as its expertise in those two fields, transcosmos will help companies build a framework for evaluating the customer experience they provide in their customer support “process” that goes through multiple contact channels. “CESMO” assists businesses in optimizing their entire customer support process from customer perspective by constantly measuring the customer experience using indexes such as traditional customer satisfaction scores and “CES: Customer Effort Score” (*1), and creating a dashboard. Ultimately, “CESMO” helps clients drive their initiative for making their customer support services even better, thereby increasing the repeat rate.

■ Constant measurement of multichannel customer support process. Why is it necessary?

Multichannel customer support services powered by digital solutions such as AI and chatbot have continued to evolve in recent years. As a result, more and more customers are experiencing a support “process” that goes through multiple channels. For example, they first try to self-solve their inquiries via FAQ and chatbot only to find themselves ending up with call agent support to get their problems solved.

transcosmos’s survey (*2) also found that the customer satisfaction score on the entire inquiry process drops by more than 20 points compared to the traditional satisfaction scores – scores measured by each channel separately – when customers have a negative customer experience, such as long waiting times, unable to or hard to find solutions, and being sent around to multiple contact points. Given today’s world where customer channels have become ever more diversified, it is critical for businesses to consider customer support service from the perspectives of “saving consumers’ time and trouble” and providing customers with an “effortless” customer experience in order to create a greater customer experience.

For businesses to succeed in this increasingly digitalized world, and serve customers via multichannel that continue to evolve, they not only need to evaluate each customer service channel separately and make partial improvements, but must also take an approach for achieving total process optimization. To achieve the goal, they must holistically evaluate their customer support process that goes through multiple channels from the “customer perspective,” thereby offering an “effortless” customer experience.

■ About “CESMO”

Given that memory of customer support experience gradually fades with time, the traditional approach for making improvements - conducting customer satisfaction surveys once or twice a year, and then run the PDCA cycle accordingly - does not help businesses take prompt action for improvement. Instead, businesses need to implement a framework which enables them to conduct a questionnaire immediately after a customer receives a customer support service and ask to evaluate their experience including any negative experience that made them feel troublesome. With the framework in place, businesses can constantly measure their customers’ overall evaluation on their support service experience whilst taking negative experience into consideration.

“CESMO” is a survey and analytics service by transcosmos that enables businesses to measure “customer effort score” on a regular basis, and optimize the entire customer support process based on the results. The two distinctive features of “CESMO” are as follows;

① Helps build an always-on survey framework for constant monitoring of customer support process (*Chart)

“CESMO” assists clients in building an end-to-end framework that enables them to check and share insights gained from customer evaluation analysis based on the customer survey. The service starts by making a list of customers who have experienced clients’ customer support services, and then conducts a survey on those who have received the services, thereby constantly measuring scores on various customer experience evaluation indexes including customer satisfaction. “CESMO” then links daily accumulated survey data with each survey respondent’s attribute data. Finally, with BI (Business Intelligence) dashboard and other tools, “CESMO” enables all related parties to check and share analytics results on a timely manner.

For clients who wish to use contact centers operated by transcosmos, transcosmos will present feasible plans that match the existing contact center environment without needing large-scale system implementation/development.

② Survey/Analytics focused on “CES,” the customer effort score, dashboard and know-how on how to utilize the results

In order to achieve total optimization of customer support process in the multichannel environment, transcosmos recommends clients to measure “CES,” the most appropriate metric to measure the amount of effort a customer had to exert to find the information they needed, or get an issue resolved. CES has been gaining attention as a metric that enables businesses to identify areas for improvement easier, and to increase the repeat rate. transcosmos’s own research as well as overseas research has proved that improving CES and offering effortless customer experience has a profound impact on increasing purchase frequency and preventing customer churn.

“CESMO” collects and accumulates every kind of customer support experience data using a questionnaire that consists of transcosmos proprietary survey questions. It then generates a “Spot Analysis Report” which tells which type of customers with specific attributes (gender, age, etc.) should be led to which channel, and analyzes the potential impact of reduced amount of effort felt by customers in the process on their overall evaluation of customer support service and repeat purchases. With the results of such an analysis, “CESMO” identifies the troublesome experience and processes that may cause customer churn. Based on those findings, “CESMO” constantly monitors customer support experience using “Regular Dashboard,” catches warning signs for potential opportunity loss and customer churn in a timely fashion, and urges clients to take prompt action for improvement.

transcosmos will continue to help clients develop strategic plans for providing customer support services tailored to this multichannel age.

*1: CES is an abbreviation of Customer Effort Score. CES is a customer feedback metric that measures the amount of effort a customer made in their interaction with a business to get an issue resolved.

*2: “Business-to-Consumer Communication Survey 2020” Visit here (Japanese only): https://www.trans-cosmos.co.jp/data/2020dec/）

* transcosmos is a trademark or registered trademark of transcosmos inc. In Japan and other countries. 

* Other company names and product or services names used here are trademarks or registered trademarks of respective companies. 

■About transcosmos inc.

transcosmos launched its operations in 1966. Since then, we have combined superior “people” with up-to-date “technology” to enhance the competitive strength of our clients by providing them with superior and valuable services. transcosmos currently offers services that support clients’ business processes focusing on both sales expansion and cost optimization through our 169 bases across 30 countries/regions with a focus on Asia, while continuously pursuing Operational Excellence. Furthermore, following the expansion of e-commerce market on the global scale, transcosmos provides a comprehensive One-Stop Global E-Commerce services to deliver our clients’ excellent products and services in 48 countries/regions around the globe. transcosmos aims to be the “Global Digital Transformation Partner” of our clients, supporting the clients’ transformation by leveraging digital technology, responding to the ever-changing business environment.