AUSTIN, Texas, June 21, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Tethr, the leading AI-powered conversational intelligence platform for listening enterprises today announced the Tethr Effort Index (TEI), the market's first machine learning-based, predictive effort score. Leveraging decades of research on customer effort, TEI will soon be incorporated into the Tethr platform for all Tethr customers, enabling companies to track customer effort at a conversation-level in real time, immediately drilling down into high-effort interactions that are likely to create disloyalty and churn.
The Customer Effort Score (CES), originally introduced in 2010 in research conducted by a team that was led by Tethr's Chief Product Officer Matt Dixon while at CEB (now Gartner) has been viewed as a powerful alternative to traditional measures of customer loyalty such as CSAT and NPS and has proven to be a better predictor of customer loyalty, especially in transactional interactions like customer service. Yet, while a recent market study from CCW Digital highlights reducing customer effort as the #1 priority for customer experience leaders, effective measurement remains elusive with half of organizations having no insight into the effort associated with their customer experiences and over 75% of organizations planning to continue to use surveys to address it.
Inspired by the original Effort research, the TEI represents a massive improvement in customer experience measurement. No more waiting for low-response rate surveys or trying to decipher thin customer verbatim to figure out how to reduce customer effort. For Tethr customers, the TEI score is automatically assigned at the completion of every customer interaction, allowing managers to immediately understand the effort level of an interaction--speeding time to deliver critical customer interventions and eliminating the need to wait for survey responses to trickle in.
While surveys are a powerful tool in the CX measurement suite, the TEI is based on the premise that leaders should stop using them to answer questions that they already know the answers to. Customers have already provided all of the insight a company could possibly need in the interactions (the phone calls, chats, etc.) that preceded the survey. And, with the new TEI, companies can quickly and easily identify high-effort interactions in a way not possible until now.
"When my team at CEB (now Gartner) invented the Customer Effort Score ten years ago, we felt it provided a great way for companies to identify those high-effort interactions that lead to disloyalty and churn," explains Dixon. "Unfortunately, the CES is a survey question which means that it suffers from low--and, for most companies, declining--response rates, weak customer verbatim and well-known flaws like extreme response and recall biases. The Tethr Effort Index solves for all of these issues--massive sample size, no bias and incredibly rich customer verbatim--by applying AI and machine learning to assessing and measuring effort levels in a customer interaction. This is the cold fusion of customer experience measurement."
The TEI is an AI-derived metric, measuring the effort for each customer interaction based on more than 100 independent variables and thousands of discrete phrases and utterances that have proved to be statistically significant in either increasing or reducing customer effort.
A pioneer and market leader in measuring effort in customer conversations, Tethr built the industry's only native effort algorithm into an AI-based conversation analytics platform. The TEI leverages the power of the platform to scan the complete context of customer conversations and predict the score a customer would have given on a survey without having to ask the customer to fill out the survey. Coupled with the Tethr Effort dashboard and reports, leaders can quickly pinpoint with tremendous precision, the biggest opportunities for improvement in the customer experience — whether it's a change to a digital channel like the app or website, a product fix, a call handling process change or an opportunity to coach agents on new skills and behaviors.
The Tethr Effort Index is scheduled for general availability in July 2019. Once available, all Tethr customers, regardless of the plan they are on, will start seeing a Tethr Effort Index score assigned to every phone call and chat processed through the platform.
About Tethr
Tethr is a cloud-based conversation intelligence platform that combines powerful AI, machine learning and decades of customer experience research to surface contextual insights from phone calls and other customer interactions. Customers are using Tethr to quickly, easily and accurately turn large amounts of unstructured customer conversation data into information that fuels smarter decisions and improved business performance. For more information, visit tethr.com.
SOURCE Tethr

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