Corporate Executive Board introduces Customer Effort Score!

In 2008, Corporate Executive Board trademarked "Customer Effort Score" based on their research. Some of the findings included:

• 80% of CEB's members used Customer Satisfaction Surveys as their primary customer experience metric.
  
• 12% of CEB's members used Net Promoter.
• 8% used something else - usually a large number of metrics.

Corporate Executive Board (CEB) then went further to find how these metrics were able to predict repurchase and increased spend.

• CSAT scores were found to be the less predictive and introduced a large number of false positives and false negatives. Repurchasing found that 20% of satisfied customers would not repurchase, while 28% of unsatisfied customers would repurchase. Likewise, 45% of satisfied customers will not spend more, but 11% of unsatisfied customers will spend more.
• Similarly with Net Promoter Score (NPS), 14% of promoters would not repurchase, while 19% of detractors would repurchase. Additionally, 27% of promoters will not spend more and 7% of detractors will spend more.

CEB went on to examine a common denominator to find what elements could cleanse these metrics and determined that the level of effort that a customer must put into the experience clearly defined how they would spend in the future, both repurchase and increased spend. Specifically, 94% of customers that put a low level of effort into their experience, would repurchase from those companies. Meanwhile, 88% of customers that put a low level of effort into the engagement, would increase their spending, based on this perceived simplicity because of the low level of effort.

CEB went on to construct the measurement for Customer Effort with an objective and subjective component. The objective components measured callbacks within 14 days. The analysis showed that 70% of all customers said that 2 or 3 calls registed as "Moderate-to-High" effort, where only 30% gave that rating for those that made only one call. The subjective component was a customer survey.

Companies that can track customer effort, especially at the issue level, and can provide tracking at the customer, issue, and agent level, are much better positioned to solve for customer effort.

I would highly recommend getting hold of CEB's Customer Effort Score and how the subjective component is derived.

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