In a comparable but competing logic, other authors have supported the thesis of an increasing return on satisfaction on loyalty (The Delight Principle). That is to say, when we increase customer satisfaction, their propensity for loyalty increases more than proportionately as soon as we adopt a process of excellence. The main disadvantage of such an approach is that it is operationally extremely expensive and has a highly questionable (financial) return on investment. In other words, we contradict the notion of “super-quality” and replace it with the principle of “delight” (or investment in quality without limits...).
The Customer Effort Score invites us to a very different approach. The studies carried out by these authors suggest that customer loyalty (more precisely their loyalty intention) is explained more by the low level of effort that customers deploy to be satisfied with a company, than by the level of delight (measured by the NPS).
Concretely, the Customer Effort Score is measured as follows:
How much effort did you have to put in to get your request processed? Please use a rating from 1 to 5, 1 meaning "low effort level", 5 meaning "high effort level", intermediate ratings allow you to qualify your judgment.
Interests:
The main advantage of this approach is to offer a more “functional” measurement of the quality of customer contact. By evaluating only his own effort, the interviewee is not led to comment on the people he dealt with. The emotional dimensions are therefore put aside in this questioning, to favor a more functional and probably objective perception,
The authors mention that this indicator is more correlated with loyalty than are overall satisfaction or NPS (via recommendation intention).
The limits:
The indicator (this is partly what was its advantage) no longer measures emotional dimensions (empathy of a call center advisor for example). However, the customer relationship is naturally a balance between emotional dimensions and functional dimensions. Sticking to the Customer Effort Score alone would therefore be particularly poor for a customer relationship management study,
Another limit concerns the scope measured: this involves evaluating the effort deployed on a given contact for a given customer request (information, management act, complaint, etc.). The measurement therefore does not cover all the dimensions of the relationship with the company, such as the contacts initiated by the latter (information campaign, direct marketing, nursing call, etc.). It is therefore a very partial measure of "customer relations",
The authors mention a stronger correlation with loyalty, but it is actually necessary to look at the details of their questionnaire to discover that it is in fact an intention of loyalty (posed in the same questionnaire) and not a loyalty observed a posteriori. As it stands, we cannot speak of the "predictive" power of the CES on loyalty, but more of a good internal logic within a questionnaire. We must therefore be extremely careful about what we intend this indicator to say on an operational level,
To summarize, the CES offers an interesting contribution to the measurement of customer relationship management by integrating a more objective evaluation of the quality delivered to the customer through the effort that the latter indicates in the context of a request that he himself sent. On the other hand, this same quality too caricaturedly reduces the measurement of customer relations, with this single indicator whose predictive power of loyalty has still not been demonstrated.
After NPS, CES has become the new reflex for strategy consulting firms, but once again, an isolated KPI does not provide any insight into the real state of customer relationships and cannot replace in-depth work.
We therefore advise integrating this indicator alongside the other usual questions for this type of study, but not limiting ourselves to this one.