Delight is overrated.
How to use Customer Effort Score to drive up loyalty.

Life is increasingly hectic for most people. Juggling family, jobs, chores and tasks takes a lot of time and focus. The last thing we need is tasks being harder or taking longer than they should.

Why is Customer Effort important?

In our dealings with businesses, both in our personal and professional lives, we want most interactions to be quick, painless and most importantly achieve the desired outcome we are looking for.

Ask yourself: As a consumer, when you pick a supplier, whether you’re buying a holiday, sorting out your broadband, or involved in onboarding a new supplier at work, what truly motivates you?

Is it the promise of being ‘delighted’ by a ‘unique experience’? Or is it a commitment to making your life as simple as possible, so you can get back to whatever truly matters to you in life: doing the gardening, working on your forehand, spending time with the kids, whatever that might be?

Instinctively, this makes sense. Delight is nice, but not at the expense of stress. We all want a beautiful-looking birthday cake, but if the cake doesn’t show up on time, it’s a disappointment, however nice it looks.

You don’t need to trust your instincts, though:

Who invented Customer Effort Score? How?

In 2010, Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nick Toman published an article in Harvard Business Review which put convincing statistics to the intuitive arguments about Customer Effort:

Indeed, 89 of the 100 customer service heads we surveyed said that their main strategy is to exceed expectations. But despite these Herculean—and costly—efforts, 84% of customers told us that their expectations had not been exceeded during their most recent interaction.

Worse still,

Twenty percent of the “satisfied” customers in our study said they intended to leave the company in question; 28% of the “dissatisfied” customers intended to stay.

A real-life example

I had an experience last week which was particularly stressful, and the worst thing was, going into it I knew it was going to be.

It was to inform our home broadband provider that our landline telephone had stopped working. After consulting help guides online and testing different things, I came to the diagnosis that the issue was with the external telephone exchange, and an Openreach engineer was required.

So I went into battle with our provider. I’ll spare the details, but in summary it took two web chat sessions and two phone calls to reach a conclusion I was satisfied with. The interactions took around two and a half hours in total. From my perspective, it was very difficult to reach the outcome I wanted, and towards the end I was very frustrated and irate.

I now think a lot less of this company, am more likely to leave them, and certainly would not recommend them to others.

(By the way, the issue was with the external exchange, and an Openreach engineer was required to fix the problem. I’m pleased to say it is now sorted).

Our provider did send me a customer satisfaction survey to complete after the interactions, which I duly did, giving them plenty of feedback about my experience. I was surprised that they asked the NPS question, but didn’t ask a question relating to customer effort, something like ‘How easy was it for me to get the issue resolved?’ If they had, I’d have responded saying it was extremely difficult, and took lots of time and caused lots of frustration and annoyance.

I also thought about the whole experience from their side. It took four different people, and well over two hours to resolve.

In terms of resource to fix the problem, it was more costly than had they got it right first time, without taking into account the cost of the lost future business from me.

Why measure Customer Effort Score?

Customer effort is closely linked to cost for the business. When things are easy for the customer, they takes less time and are less costly for the business. When things are difficult for the customer, it can take a lot of time, numerous contacts, and requires greater resources from the business.

Amazon is often regarded as a business which makes things really easy for customers. They worked out that making things difficult for customers not only reduces customer satisfaction, it also costs them more money. I’ve contacted them before when an item hasn’t arrived, and rather than quibble over it or have lengthy interactions or investigations, they simply send a replacement out. I’m happier as a customer, and they save time and associated costs by just dealing with it quickly.

Asking the customer effort question in your survey not only tells you how easy or painful the experience was for the customer, it also provides insights which can help you to make customers happier and reduce operational costs.

That is why customer effort score is such a useful metric in transactional feedback. Easy and low friction for the customer has many benefits, and improved operational efficiency and reducing costs to serve is often overlooked. It might be a secondary benefit to customers loving you more, but if convincing senior stakeholders in the business that this kind of feedback matters and makes a difference, showing that easier equals reduced costs to serve, can be a useful tool in the armoury.

Want to understand your customers’ experiences more fully? Talk to our team about how CustomerSure customer survey software can benefit your business.

Its creators, Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman argue, based on studying over 75,000 customer interactions, that great customer service is very bad at producing loyal customers.

Darren Wake

Darren is the Senior Account Manager at CustomerSure. He has a lifetime of experience working in both market research and customer experience improvement. He is responsible for working with our clients to make sure that their VoC programmes respect the customer and deliver measurable results.