Journey effort score overview

Effort is the amount of work a customer has to put in to get from their intent to an outcome, across every touchpoint in that journey. Journeys can be anything simple, such as a password reset, to anything complex, such as onboarding a new customer. During the journey, each step a customer takes generates data that can be mapped to their effort.

Effort is closely tied to satisfaction and loyalty: customers who have to wait, get transferred, repeat themselves, or don’t get resolution end up less satisfied and less loyal, even when they eventually got what they needed. Customers with a high-effort experience are far more likely to become disloyal than customers with a low-effort experience, and effort can predict loyalty more reliably than traditional measures like NPS or CSAT.

Effort is typically measured through customer surveys. Journey Management instead calculates a behavior-based effort score directly from the same interaction data it already uses to analyze journeys, so no survey is required. The score reflects a customer’s total effort across all their experiences over a fixed period.

Factors that determine effort score

The effort score is built from four contributors, each capturing a different kind of friction a customer can experience. Genesys Cloud weighs each contributor individually by how much it typically impacted an experience in relation to how much the journey itself shaped the outcome.

• Elapsed time: The total time a customer spends across voice and digital touchpoints during a conversation. Email is excluded, because email conversations can span days or weeks for reasons unrelated to effort.
• Wait/idle time: Time a customer spends waiting; this typically includes hold time during an interaction, or waiting for a system such as a virtual agent or ACD to respond. The system may be using that time productively, but the customer experiences longer wait time.
• Switches and transfers: Transitions a customer experiences during and between conversations, such as an escalation from a virtual agent to a human, or a transfer from one agent to another.
• Wasted effort (incomplete journeys): Abandoned interactions, unresolved issues, requests not recognized by virtual agents, and other outcomes where the customer Genesys Engaged but got no response, often resulting in incomplete journeys.

What data is not considered for effort score calculation

The score needs enough data to establish a meaningful 30-day range. The data is not used for calculations and is suppressed in the following cases because it does not help derive a normalization range that is statistically meaningful. When one of the conditions applies, the dashboard shows an error state instead of a misleading score.

• Fewer than 100 conversations occurring in the 30-day window. 
• There is no variation across conversations in the window. Every conversation has an identical value for each of the contributors.

Other considerations

• Email is excluded from elapsed time, since email conversations can span days or weeks for reasons that have nothing to do with effort.
• Only Genesys Cloud native events supported in Journey Management are used for the calculation.
• The formula and weights are fixed.