Customer Effort Score: February 2012

27 February 2012

Satisfy, Don't Delight

By Dr. Frederick Van Bennekom
Summary. "Delight, don't just satisfy” has been the mantra in customer service circles for many years. Satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal was the underlying assumption. Now a research project by the Customer Contact Council of the Corporate Executive Board argues that exceeding expectations has minimal marginal benefit over just meeting expectations. In essence the authors argue that satisfaction drives loyalty more than the mysterious delight factors. This article examines the argument, and specifically looks at its shortcomings in how they establish the loyalty link.

The holy grail of long term company profitability has been knowing what drives loyal behavior on the part of our customers. What gets them coming back again and again? What drives them away? How do we identify the disloyal ones to win them back? Various researchers from Reichheld's Net Promoter research to Keiningham & Vavra, Improving Your Measurement of Customer Satisfaction, have argued we have to distinguish the attributes that satisfy from those that delight. A satisfied customer may buy again, but a delighted customer is far more likely to be loyal. That's been the argument.

Net Promoter Score vs. Customer Effort Score

ZANNA VAN DER AA, MIND THEM @ MINDTHEMNL

Around 2007/2008 I noticed that the Net Promoter Score (NPS) has now become a good hype. Virtually all organizations who took part in my research asked me: do you know the NPS score? Could you also can take in your research? It is now 2012 and the NPS management and Board level in many organizations seeped through. That in itself is good (and finally support for the customer at the highest level), but the NPS has not been superseded by the Customer Effort Score (CES)? In this blog an attempt to both metrics in perspective.

Customer Effort Score is only one-sixth of a total service experience

By David Conway, Chief Strategy Officer, Nunwood

http://www.customerexperiencemagazine.org/Issue12/DavidConway.html

The July 2010 Harvard Business Review article ‘Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers’, introduced a new measure to the field of customer experience measurement - the Customer Effort Score (CES) and the last issue of Customer Experience Magazine, discussing the pros and cons of this measure, raised a lot of discussions.

Its proponents claim it’s more predictive of future consumer behaviour than higher order measures such as CSAT and NPS.

They propose that focusing deliberately on it will “improve customer service, reduce customer service costs and decrease customer churn”.

The promises attributed to this singular focus have resonated strongly across customer experience teams - there is no doubt effort is an interesting metric; it plays to the rapid results demands of our times, is straightforward to implement and elegantly simple in design.

However, like NPS before, it is the simplicity of the measure that has caused controversy. Few critics have problems with the measure per se. They struggle with a measure that excludes product, price, brand and the competitive environment being cited as the primary determinant of customer loyalty.

Forget Net Promoter, try the Customer Effort Score

At a time when securing the long-term loyalty – and revenue – of your customers is a priority, new research shows that delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty, but reducing the effort required from them in order to get their problem solved, does.

Keith Pearce investigates…

Few people will argue that the profile and behaviours of the average consumer have changed in the last 18 months.
Recent ContactBabel research, commissioned by Genesys, shows that while service provision has not declined, customer complaints are up 34 per cent in the last year.
Customers are just more ready to find fault and speak out about it.
The natural response is for businesses to expend a lot of time, resource and money on enhancing service and trying to ‘delight’ the customer.

But does the benefit of ‘delighting’ customers build that elusive customer loyalty?

Is effort the new loyalty? (Marketing Week)

Customer service is a vital element for brand loyalty and part of this is making it as easy as possible for consumers to find answers to their questions. Collecting data from interactions can help smooth the process

“Loyalty is a very loaded term. Who are we loyal to? Friends and family. But not really companies,” warned BT’s customer experience futurologist Dr Nicola Millard at Marketing Week’s Customer Retention summit in September.

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Feb 02, 2012 (1)

By: Mary Murcott

Customer Experience. It's the latest buzz-phrase in customer service. Everyone wants CE in his or her title. It gives the executive influence, because it broadens the scope of what is controlled and measured. It is the company's neural-network node to customer loyalty and ultimately profitability. In other words, an update of the 1980's Service – Profit Chain:

Service + Experience → Loyalty + Word of Mouth → Profitability

So, if you have the new title “Customer Experience”, some new metrics are in order. Metrics that go beyond Net Promoter, First Contact Resolution, Service Level, or Service Level Consistency.

Customer Surveys & Net Promoter driving Your Customer Interactions

http://www.verintblog.com/index.php/tag/ken-bernhardt
Recently Oscar Alban hosted a webinar with Ken Bernhardt focused on customer surveys and net promoter scores. There were well over 250 attendees and a number of good questions resulting from this discussion. Below are three of those questions and answers for information.

How to reduce your Customer Effort Score

The Customer Effort Score explained

Please see our earlier posts on the similar theme to the details of the formally published Customer Effort Score. This post serves to explore the Customer Effort Score from the view of a Customer Contact Centre Solutions provider; and to explain, more in laymans terms what the Customer Effort Score means, and how it may apply in our typical day to day experiences. Better still, it provides direct examples of how to reduce your Customer Effort Score!

Customer Effort Score - HBR Article

Customer Effort outperforms Net Promoter and Customer Satisfaction scores – Harvard Business Review found

Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort - the work they must do to get their problem solved – does, a study conducted by Harvard Business Review found, and acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn.