Perceived Customer Effort
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Jun 25, 2010
As I blogged about last May, the Corporate Executive Board has introduced a proprietary measure, the Customer Effort ScoreTM, that shows a strong negative correlation to loyalty: the more effort a customer must put forth in a service interaction, the less likely they are to be loyal. In fact, "The probability that a service interaction will drive disloyalty is approximately four times greater than the chance it will create any positive loyalty impression. In other words, as a function, customer service typically plays on the ‘negative side' of the loyalty field," said Matthew Dixon, Ph.D., Managing Director of the Customer Contact Council and originator of the metric.
Since NPS in a customer-service survey never struck me as a useful transactional measure, and since CES matched my mental model of how service transactions affect loyalty, I decided to experiment with CES. And the Corporate Executive Board has done an impressive amount of research behind it, based on results from just under 18,000 surveys.
As a Conference Executive Board client, Vovici was able to take the proprietary measure and include it in a number of surveys along with an open-ended follow-up (much as we used to discover that Net Promoter Score is a misnomer).
What we found was that the question, as phrased by CEB, actually provoked some respondents. These respondents incorrectly inferred that we were criticizing them for not putting enough effort on their part into the transaction. We tried wordsmithing the question and saying the goal was to minimize effort, but even that did not mollify respondents.
Our current experiments, which we continue to bill to clients as experiments, involve two versions of a perceived customer effort question. Here's the first take:
How effortless was your interaction with us today?
Completely laborious, Mostly laborious, Somewhat laborious, Neither laborious nor effortless, Somewhat effortless, Mostly effortless, Completely effortless
This new scale, while wordy, offered two improvements: first, low scores are bad, as the scale is reversed from the CEB's scale, offering positive correlations to standard CSAT and loyalty questions. Second, it's a seven-point bipolar scale, which is the most reliable and valid number of points for a bipolar scale.
Unfortunately, this had a lower correlation to customer assessment of agent helpfulness, timeliness and ticket resolution than the official CES question.
| CES Scale | Laboriousness Scale |
| Helpfulness | -0.395 | 0.237 |
| Timeliness | -0.387 | 0.126 |
| Overall Quality | -0.318 | 0.247 |
The second take:
How easy was it for you to obtain the support you needed from us?
Not at all easy, Slightly easy, Moderately easy, Very easy, Extremely easy
The improvements of this approach: it is less wordy, offers a reliable five-point unipolar scale, unipolar scales are less taxing on respondents than bipolar scale and it had a higher correlation to other transactional measures.
| CES Scale | Ease
Scale |
| Helpfulness | -0.395 | 0.511 |
| Timeliness | -0.387 | 0.558 |
| Overall Quality | -0.318 | 0.481 |
We will continue to laboriously experiment with this approach and will share the results here, when we can be assured they will be extremely easy for you to apply!