Eliminate Callbacks and Restarts - A Sure Fire Way to Lower Customer Effort

Customer Effort Score (CES) is the new hot metric for customer service. (CES) has been widely discussed since the HBR Article, Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers (July, 2010), where Customer Effort Score was touted as being a better predictor of customer loyalty than Net Promoter Score or First Contact Resolution. While CES is an important metric and arguably the best metric to focus your service operation, there is no such thing as a “magic metric”. Getting results from implementing CES depends on execution and focus.

Not another measure – Customer Effort Score – good but no Cigar

For some firms Customer Effort Score (CES) may appear as the next Net Promoter Score. The compelling proposition is that firms should not obsess so much about ‘delighting’ customers as get the basics right! Make it easy or effortless for them. This is all well and good, but as with most things in life the law of ‘it depends’ applies. It depends on what you are selling, if it’s a theme park, focusing on the amount of effort customers expend is not really going to make for a great customer experience although the reverse may well be true if you are a poor call centre.