5 Simple Strategies to Reduce Customer Effort

Idit Aloni-Halfon, Enterprise Portfolio Marketing Manager

We already know that the secret for organizations to increase customer loyalty is by improving the customer experience by focusing on the way customers feel. A key factor in doing so is reducing the amount of effort required by customers to receive the service they expect. Reduced customer effort will lead to improved customer experience and increased customer loyalty, and, as a result, to a higher ROI. 

How can this be achieved? Take a look at our five strategies.

Customer Effort Score™ and NPS: Gangnam Style Metrics?

By: Randy Brandt

Back in November, 2008 the Corporate Executive Board proclaimed the Customer Effort Score™ or CES to be “the best measure of customer loyalty.”   CES is derived from a question asked of customers who have recently contacted a company’s call center or experienced some other specific transaction with that company.  “How much effort did you personally have to put forth in order to handle your request?” the customer is asked, and his/her answer furnishes the basis of the CES score.

Five years later, the buzz around CES is starting to build.

Ease the customer down the aisle

New research looks at how consumers rate nine grocery retailers in terms of ‘effort to shop’ and finds that the easier the experience, the more likely customers will remain loyal.

The more effort a customer has to put into a dealing with a brand, the less likely they are to be a loyal customer, according to new research. Customers reporting ’low effort experiences’ are more likely to go out of their way to keep using a brand.

Research agency BDRC Continental generated a Customer Effort Score for nine retailers by asking 1,000 customers to rate the ‘effort’ of an experience on a five point scale, where one equals very low effort and five equals very high effort.