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.

What you have to do is consider how, in your situation, Customer Effort Score is important to driving increased revenue or decreased costs into your business, as well as what drives CES. Just measuring a number will never tell you what to do anymore than continuously weighing yourself will tell you how to lose weight.

I like to think of CES as similar to the Beyond Philosophy Emotion Profile. Here we look at how high the positive customer emotions are and how low the negative. A company with high negative customer emotions is evoking feelings of, for instance, unhappiness or frustration. As a business you are creating if you like ‘high’ effort to do business with you. But this is only one half of the story, time and time again we quantify the effect and find that companies are actually pretty good on average, reducing the negatives. What they are bad at is understanding the positive emotions, and how to make an ordinary experience more emotionally engaging. Remember, these are not mutually exclusive, you feel good about Apple and are more likely to forgive their mistakes, you feel bad about Ryan Air and more likely to look for them.