The Eddy Effect: The Top Driver of Bad Customer Experience

If you’ve ever spent any time on a river — particularly a river with a rapid current or white water — you have likely witnessed an eddy. An eddy is a circular movement of water, counter to the main current, causing a small whirlpool. It looks something like this:

A river eddy occurs when there is an object interrupting the main current or water flow. This could be a large boulder or a downed tree. The water that enters an eddy cycles in a circular motion and smaller objects can get stuck inside the ever-spinning whirlpool.

In our work at Authenticx, we observe a similar phenomenon experienced by many customers in their interactions with companies. This negative customer experience occurs when the ideal customer journey is obstructed due to a barrier, such as ineffective business processes or poor service. In these situations, customers are not able to obtain the product or service they expected, necessitating they return to the company to try to remove the obstacle.

At Authenticx, we call this the Eddy Effect. And it happens more often than you might think.

How Common is the Eddy Effect for Customers?

Have you ever ordered something at the fast-food drive-thru, only to find that after you drove away half your order was missing?  Or, perhaps, you’ve been told by a customer service representative to “check back tomorrow”?  Or maybe you purchased something online but never received your purchase confirmation email, so you had to call to make sure the order went through? These are all examples of being caught in the Eddy Effect.

At Authenticx, this is often one of the first, and biggest, problems we tackle with our clients. Almost every company we’ve worked with has a few eddies, and some have a lot. We’ve seen these eddies be responsible for as much as 40% of inbound customer contacts – proving they’re are a huge driver of bad customer interactions.

Now, I know what you are thinking. “We measure First Contact Resolution in our company. We’ve got this problem under control.” To which I would ask: are you sure? There are many ways to game First Contact Resolution metrics to make it appear as though your customer contacts are “one and done.” Are you validating your metrics, or just trusting the numbers?

If you haven’t explored the depths of your own customer interaction data to uncover potential eddies, try the following first steps:

• Identify the average number of non-purchase-related inbound contacts per customer and the average length of time in between contacts from the same customer.
• Perform listening and analysis to understand the customers’ reasons for these contacts. Explore beyond the system’s standard call reason code reports. You need to truly uncover the root cause, from the customer’s perspective.

From here, you can begin to formulate themes and diagnose what is causing your eddies – ineffective business processes, gaps in training, technology errors, etc.

Why Does the Eddy Effect Matter?

Preventing eddies in your customer experience is worthy work and not only because it immensely improves your customers’ impressions of your brand. The effort also tackles drains on your company’s profitability. After all, correcting eddies on a case-by-case basis impacts your team’s time, effort, and energy. If eddy-related contacts comprise as much as 40% of your inbound, imagine what fixing them could do for your budget.

Worried you have eddies, but don’t have the infrastructure to discover them? Let Authenticx help. We’re experts in finding the insights hiding among your customer interactions.

See Authenticx in Action

Learn more about how Authenticx analyzes customer conversations to surface recurring trends in this two-minute video.

About Authenticx

Authenticx was founded to analyze and activate customer interaction data at scale. Why? We wanted to reveal transformational opportunities in healthcare. We are on a mission to help humans understand humans. With a combined 100+ years of leadership experience in pharma, payer, and healthcare organizations, we know first-hand the challenges and opportunities that our clients face because we’ve been in your shoes.

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