Read the Article

This article from the Customer Contact Council (CCC), featured in the July edition of the Harvard Business Review, answers three questions:

1. How important is customer service to loyalty?
2. Which customer service activities increase loyalty, and which don't?
3. Can companies increase loyalty without raising their customer service operating costs?

After conducting structured interviews with customer service leaders and a study of more than 75,000 customers, the CCC uncovered three findings:

1. Exceeding expectations during service interactions has negligible impact on customer loyalty.

2. Service organizations create loyal customers primarily by reducing customer effort – i.e. helping them solve their problems quickly and easily – not by delighting them in service interactions.

3. In the customer service environment, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a weak predictor of customer loyalty. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is slightly better. Customer Effort Score (CES), however, tops the charts with the highest predictive power.

Access the Tool

Customer Effort Score (CES) Audit

The CES Audit enables executives responsible for service interactions and their teams to identify the ways customers are expending the greatest effort across all service channels (e.g., Web, IVR, E-mail, Chat, Phone), and brainstorm ways to reduce that effort and, therefore, reduce disloyalty.

This tool can help answer three core questions:

1. Where is the greatest opportunity to reduce customer effort for my organization?
2. What specifically can I improve within each service channel?
3. What are the practical and proven solutions to address my needs?

CES Audit FAQ's

• Q: What will I get from taking the audit?
  A: The audit will surface “effort-causing” areas within each channel that need to be addressed. For example, you can calculate effort leverage scores which indicates the greatest opportunities for improvement.
• Q: How long will this audit take?
  A: You can take the audit individually in less than 30 minutes. Many organizations complete the tool as a team, discussing the inputs and the impact on each channel. This team exercise typically takes two hours.
• Q: Who should take the audit?
  A: The manager or above of the service organization. We recommend having the team participate in the exercise as well.