Customer experience smackdown: Customer Effort Score vs NPS vs satisfaction

Posted By Natalie Brandweiner in Customer intelligence, Customer experience

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MyCustomer examines the Customer Effort Score as a measure of customer experience - and looks at how it shapes up next to Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction. 

Using recommendation or satisfaction-based techniques to measure customer loyalty is a well-established practice in the marketing world, and not without its controversies. Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), the first of such measurements, determines customer loyalty based on the question ‘Would you recommend the company to others?’ and hailed by Reichheld as the “single most reliable indicator” of company growth. It enjoyed a stint of popularity in the 1990s before becoming heavily criticised and moving over for another measurement.

Customer satisfaction measurement (CSAT) determines how an organisation meets the expectations of its customers based on satisfaction. Customers are asked a question based on how satisfied they are with the company following a transaction which is then rated from one (very dissatisfied) to five (very satisfied), although has also fallen under criticism, mostly for its lack of detail.

Beyond Net Promoter®: measure your emotional preference score

Author: Steven Walden, published on 20 Jun 2012

Classically firms are inward focusing asking questions such as how satisfied are our customers or how likely are they to recommend US. These are all great questions but they all suffer the same problem, they do not differentiate your company in terms of the market.

Think of it this way:

1. I can say I am very satisfied with your firm, but I can say pretty much the same thing about many other organisations as well
2. I can say I would highly recommend your firm, but I can say pretty much the same thing about many other organisations as well.

This is important for when customers consider using your services, brands or products they are always consciously or implicitly playing a game of compare and contrast. Your firm does not sit in isolation; it is always set in market context.

So what is a differentiating question, one that considers these market conditions?

What's Your Customer Effort (Score)?

There's been a lot of discussion or debate about Customer Effort Score (a metric developed by the Corporate Executive Board's Customer Contact Council), especially relative to Net Promoter Score, about whether it's an effective metric to use to measure the customer experience.


For those of you who don't know, Customer Effort Score (CES) is, in short, derived from one question that you'll add to your post-transactional survey(s) to assess the degree of effort that the customer had to exert in order to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, a product purchased/returned, or a question answered. (Many were first exposed to the concept behind CES in this HBR article, Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers.) The survey question goes roughly like this: