Building The Business Case For Customer Effort1

Building the Business Case
for Customer Effort
White Paper
CEB Customer Contact
Leadership Council
Effortless Experience
Dashboard
Metrics are not in short supply in service organizations, but which metric is
the most powerful for measuring the customer service experience and driving
systematic changes? This white paper will provide data and support that
highlights customer effort as the key metric behind becoming a world-class
service organization.
Introduction
Why should we care about
customer effort?
Across the CEB Customer Contact Leadership Council and Effortless Experience
Dashboard programs, we work with service organizations to make the business case for
measuring customer effort. We know your colleagues within the service organization and
beyond are curious and want answerswhy should we care about customer effort?
Most companies are metrics driven, so to optimize to a new idea such as effort or to make
changes to the customer service experience, organizations typically want to measure
effort within that service experience and quantify changes to demonstrate the new idea's
ROI. Developing a low-effort service experience means developing a system where
measurement is a critical first step, but organizations should take this a step further and
use the measurement to drive service improvements. This white paper provides guidance
on building the case internally for measuring customer efforta critical step on the path to
becoming a low-effort organization.
Why Customer Effort? Three Key Advantages

1. Predictive Validity
Customer effort in the service experience has a proven relationship to higher-level
organizational goals that you and your colleagues care about. Reducing customer effort:
Mitigates disloyalty, and
Reduces the cost of resolving service requests.

2. Actionability
We have studied customer effort for nearly a decade to understand exactly what drives it,
and so we understand how to positively impact the metric and service experience.
You can reduce customers' exertion of effort by managing the discrete things they
must do to resolve their service requests.
For even more impact, you can leverage your contact center reps to engineer loweffort experiences by influencing perceptions, or how customers feel about service
interactions.
3. Relatability
Beginning to measure customer effort in the service organization may require buy-in
from other functionsand once youve measured effort, youll almost undoubtedly need
to work across the organization to make upstream, low-effort changes. Arm yourself on
how effortless and easy experiences translate across internal functions.
Progressive sales organizations focus on making the sales process effortless.
Progressive marketing organizations drive brand loyalty by making purchase

decisions easy and simple.
This study may not be reproduced or redistributed without the expressed permission of CEB.
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Phone: +1-866-913-6451
E-Mail: CustomerContact.Support@cebglobal.com
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Why Measure Anything?

Theres a saying in business that what gets measured gets improved because
measurement holds people and groups accountable and gives organizations something to
optimize to. Its hard to imagine that a service organization would encourage development
of new skills, create new service channels, or hire differently without a sense of whether
those changes matter and are working. But how do service organizations know what to
measure? And once they decide what to measure, how do they impact that metric and get
others on board? Weve found that a concept worth optimizing to must be valid, actionable,
and relatable. Customer effort is just thata concept that accounts for customer perception
of ease as well as efficiency in the service interaction.
Why Effort? Predictive Validity

In the service organization, few (if any) metrics are measured because they themselves
are goals. Each metric is measured because it correlates with a higher-level business goal,
such as customer loyalty, cost savings, or revenue growth. Some metrics may also correlate
with an intermediate goal known to impact business outcomes. For example, customer
satisfaction (CSAT) is often measured in the service experience because of the suggested
relationship to future customer loyalty, and average handle time (AHT) is captured based
on its tie to cost-reduction projects. Well refer to any metric that correlates to another goal
as having predictive validity. Our research has demonstrated that effort is the best service
metric to consider in this sense, based on the strength of relationship with customer loyalty
and cost savings accrued.
Customer Effort and Loyalty

When tested in more than 50 of the largest customer service organizations, customer
effort was 40% more accurate than customer satisfaction in predicting loyalty. In fact, our
data finds that 96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction are more disloyal,
compared to only 9% with low-effort interactions.
Ability to Predict Customer Loyalty

R-Squared Compilation
Customer
Satisfaction
= 1.0x
Customer
Effort
vs.
= 1.4x
Source: CEB 2012 Customer Loyalty Survey.
Effort is also a strong predictor of Net Promoter Score (NPS), one of the most-used metrics
to gauge the overall health of a customer relationship.
Impact of Customer Effort on NPS

Percentage of Company Detractors
Effort complements
company-level loyalty
measures, including NPS.
Low
Effort
= 4%
vs.
High
Effort
= 67%
Source: CEB 2012 Customer Loyalty Survey.
Through its strong predictability of loyalty, customer effort helps you to identify at-risk
customers who are in the process of or are considering churning out and to proactively reach
out to them. Customers with a high-effort service experience are much more likely to leave
the company and spread negative word-of-mouth. However, service organizations currently
focus proactive outreach primarily on customers who actively complain to the company. This
squeaky wheel strategy only reaches a small fraction of all customers who have high-effort
service interactions. Using customer effort as a risk indicator enables your proactive strategy
to capture all target customers and better mitigate churn.
BUILDING THE BUSINESS CASE FOR CUSTOMER EFFORT
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Customer Effort and Cost Savings

Through our Effortless Experience Dashboard data, weve found that what tends to
increase effort also tends to increase costs. We determine cost to serve by identifying
which service channels customers are using and how many times they must contact within
or across those channels to ultimately resolve a request. We tie that information to our
annually collected benchmark data on cost to serve per contact, collected from contact
centers across companies and industries, to determine total cost to resolve a request.
Cost to Serve by Customer Efforta Level

Average Cost
Total Cost to Resolve

Service Request
$30.00
$15.00
$0.00
Low
High
Customer Effort
n = 145,418 customers.
Source: CEB 2015 Effortless Experience Dashboard.
a
Effort comprises ease of handling the issue, if contact is worth the effort, and relative time required.
Lower numbers are better.
To elaborate on the above graph, from our dataset of more than 145,000 customer
responses, weve indeed found that higher customer effort throughout the service
interaction is associated with more expensive total cost to resolve service requests. Factors
that cause these higher costs could include: unclear policies, redundant processes, poorly
skilled reps, and limited technology.
Proven Relationship to Business Outcomes

Measuring effort and optimizing to a low-effort experience can improve customer loyalty
(or mitigate customer disloyalty) and lead to major cost savings. Service organizations and
companies interested in mitigating disloyalty and minimizing service costs should focus on
decreasing customer effort as a means to achieve those higher level goals.
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Why Effort? Actionability

Measuring effort positions service organizations to more confidently take action to improve
the customer service experience. Our research across the past decade has been designed to:
Understand customer effort from many angles, and
Arm companies with knowledge and strategies to decrease customer effort.
This actionability element ensures that once the link between customer effort reduction
and/or loyalty and cost-savings goals has been made, we can also support you as you
use effort measurements to identify exactly how you can reduce effort within your own
organization.
Many seemingly good effort reduction options exist. After you start measuring effort,
your organization may be thinking, What should we do next to reduce customer effort?
To answer this question, we conducted a two-part survey to surface inexpensive and
immediate ways to reduce effort that are also within the control of the service organization.
The first part of the survey asked more than 4,500 customers to gauge the effort required
in a recent service interaction, and part two asked 36 companies about their operations
and processes as they relate to reducing customer effort. The results of this analysis were
surprising to many.
Your current effort reduction initiatives only tackle one-third of the effort equation.
An overwhelming 73% of service organizations focus their effort reduction initiatives on
decreasing what the customer has to exert or do with a company (things like number of
contacts, transfers, and repeating information), but our customer-facing survey analysis
reveals that these attributes only account for 35% of customer effort.
Customer interpretation of their service experience has the greatest impact on effort.
Customer interpretation refers to how the representative resolves a request and makes the
customer feel about the interaction in the process. In contrast with the do side, customer
interpretation accounts for the feel side. In fact, 65% of effort comes from the customers
interpretation of how the rep made him or her feel. This means that frontline reps have a
huge role to play in reducing customer effort in the service experience.
Given the degree of control that reps have over impacting customer effort, rather than
just focusing on basic soft skills (which have no measurable impact on effort reduction),
leading companies teach their reps experience engineering skillsa strategy that actively
guides customers through an interaction designed to anticipate and preemptively react to
emotional responses for mutually beneficial outcomes.
Drivers of Customer Effort
34.6%
What
customers
have to do
65.4%
How the rep
made the
customer feel
(Do Side)
(Feel Side)
Source: CEB 2011 Customer Effort Survey.
Service organizations will surface both do and feel opportunities as they measure
customer effort. Many do this by taking a closer look at the customers who score their
interactions as high effort. Cutting the data by issue type, customer segment, product, or
center can often provide additional color. Other organizations use quality assurance teams
or technology to listen to those higher-effort calls for trends.
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Effort Drivers on the Do Side

Do is still 35% of the effort equation and it does matter, so we must continue to identify
improvements here. Identifying the drivers of customer effort on the do side is relatively
straightforward, and this is why many service organizations that focus on effort reduction
start with this part of effort.
Customer exertion encompasses the number of steps and actions a customer has to take
during the service experience, including wait time, transfers, repeating information,
repeated contacts, and channel switching. By pairing the effort score with these metrics,
service organizations can often identify areas of improvement.
These factors all have different levels of impact on customer effort. For example, when
customers have to contact again to resolve their requests, effort increases by 43%.
Do Factors That Impact Effort Significantly

Exertion
Factor
Detail
Efforta Impact
Repeat
Contacts
Customers who resolved in two contacts

compared to only one
43% increase
in effort
Channel
Switching
Customers starting on the web who

switch to the phone to resolve, relative
to customers starting on the web and
resolving there
30% increase
in effort
Repeating
Information
Customers who must frequently repeat

information relative to everyone else
46% increase
in effort
a
By measuring customer effort alongside these other metrics, service organizations will
gain tangible insights into knowing what actions should be taken to reduce the do side of
customer effort.
See p. 8 for more detail on actions you can take to reduce effort
on the do side.
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Effort Drivers on the Feel Side

The feel side of effort is
wholly in the hands of your
frontline staff.
While the do is important, the feel makes up the majority of customer effort. Unlike the
do side of effort where many things can be controlled by the company, the feel side of
effort is largely in the hands of your frontline staff. Therefore, it becomes critical to develop
your frontline staff with the right competencies and to hold them accountable for their
behaviors. Our many years of research on rep skills, competencies, and behaviors uncovered
three core competencies that help frontline staff deliver the low-effort service experience,
as described in the Effortless Experience Competency Framework:
Interaction Tailoring and Content SurfacingTailoring the reps communication style

to match the communication style and preferred issue resolution path of the customer
and identifying implicit and explicit customer needs through purposeful, probing
questions
Experience EngineeringInfluencing the customers perception of the experience
through positioning techniques and use of language
Forward ResolvingPreemptively resolving the next likely issue(s) that the customer
may not articulate in the moment but that will cause a repeat call
Effortless Experience Skills Framework
v
ol
es
Forward R
Effortless
Experience
Skills Framework
in
g
En
gi
ne
erin
g
nd
eraction Tai
Int ontent Su lorin
C
rfa g
cin a
g
ce
i en
r
e
Exp
Interaction Tailoring
and Content Surfacing
Experience Engineering
Forward Resolving
Skills include:
Skills include:
Skills include:
Flexing
communication styles
Owning and
advocating
Active listening
Surfacing additional
information
Acknowledging
baggage
Using positive
language
Recognizing
opportunities
Positioning naturally
Positioning
alternatively
Source: CEB analysis.
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Effort Drivers on the Feel Side (Continued)

By advancing from average
to world-class performance
on these skills, companies can
decrease perceived customer
effort by almost 75%.
These competencies have been proven to impact customer effort significantly; by achieving
world-class performance on these skills, companies can decrease perceived customer effort
by almost 75%.
Customer Efforta with Improved Performance of the Effortless

Experience Skills
Average Effort Indexed
1.00
1.00
0.50
0.25
0.00
Average Performance
World-Class Performance
a
Given that frontline reps have full control over reducing customer effort on the feel side,
it is crucial to understand if and how well they are demonstrating the effortless experience
skills. By establishing the effort measurement system and coupling it with quality assurance
call listening or call analytics technologies, service organizations will gain a clear picture of
the overall competency level of the frontline staff and inform next steps.
Action-Oriented Measurement
The goal of using a metric is not to just add it to your dashboard. The true motivation for
measuring anything is to improve it by taking actions. Understanding the effort system
knowing what drives effort and what you can do to reduce customer effortallows you to
take action, giving you the confidence you need to make things happen.
See p. 9 for more detail on actions you can take to reduce effort
on the feel side.
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Actions You Can Take to Reduce Effort on the Do Side

The do side encompasses the number of steps and actions a customer has to take during the service
experiencein other words, the customer service journey. A low-effort service journey starts with picking
the right channel to contact the company to get an easy and efficient resolution. But if you depend on
customers themselves to figure out the best-fit channel for their issues, you wont be providing a low-effort
journey, as many customers unwittingly don't pick the best-fit channel for their issue.
Our current Effortless Experience Dashboard data, measuring experiences across almost 100 companies,
shows that in the channel customers picked first, regardless of whether it was the phone, website, web chat
or e-mail, more than half of customers did not get their issue resolved in that channel in their first attempt.
These failed first attempts and unwanted exertion factors inevitably lead to high-effort service journeys.
Therefore, managing and guiding customers to the best channel to start their service request is key to
reducing the do side of effort. Given all the new channels and choicesand that most customers don't
chose the right channel the first timeservice organizations must provide better guidance to customers so
that they can quickly and easily reach the best service channel; otherwise effort and cost will likely build up.
Our research and best practices help you develop a multichannel strategy that guides every customer to the
lowest-effort channel and creates an effortless customer journey by working on:
Where
How
to Guide
CEB Insight
Not all channels are equal.
Each channel has its own
capabilities and limitations
in resolving particular issues.
Companies are the best
positioned to connect
customers with the
lowest-effort channel, with
knowledge of own issue
types and channel features.
CEB Solution
Companies should use
Our Issue-to-Channel
Mapping Tool to audit
available service channels
and determine each
channel's appropriateness
for resolving particular
customer issues and
requests.
When
to Guide
to Guide
CEB Insight
Appealing to the familiar
construct of a live
conversation increases the
likelihood that customers
will be guided to the
right answer quickly and
efficiently.
CEB Solution
CEB best practice
showcases a low-cost online
pathing tool that mimics a
live service interaction to
actively guide customers to
the best-fit channel.
Guidance Language
Principles help companies
better understand known
levers of persuasion and
how they can subtly
influence customer behavior.
CEB Insight
Guidance should be
timed appropriately to
take advantage of critical
opportunities.
Critical opportunities
are known to service
organizations and should be
proactively utilized.
CEB Solution
CEB best practices help
service organizations
identify and leverage
service triggers that
cause a customer to contact
the company and then
guide the customer to a
low-effort channel without
the customer even noticing.
Measuring effort allows service organizations to understand which channels customers are exerting the
highest level of effort in, and they can therefore reassess the channel fit for specific issue types. These
insights will help service organizations build an effective multichannel strategy that leads to better selfservice and lower live contact volume.
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Actions You Can Take to Reduce Effort on the Feel Side

To optimize the feel side, service organizations must focus on developing reps Effortless Experience skills,
enabling them to make customers feel like the interaction is as easy as possible. Our research, best practices,
and talent solutions help you develop a holistic talent strategy that not only teaches reps how to exercise
these skills but also sustains the behaviors through:
Hiring
Developing
CEB Insight
Personality traits matter when it comes to
delivering low-effort service experiences, and
there is a certain profile that exhibits the effortless
experience skills naturally.
CEB Insight
Coaching is crucial. Good coaching increases rep
performance by up to 12%; bad coaching, however,
degrades performance nearly twice as much as
good coaching helps.
CEB Solution
Our research has found the ideal personality type
that service organizations should hire for, and with
them working in the organization, you will find
yourself at a better starting point than most of your
peers.
CEB Solution
CEBs talent solutions build reps effortless
experience skills through both on-site and virtual
learning sessions. Through this training, reps quickly
comprehend how to deliver the low-effort service
experience.
We also help supervisors deploy high-quality
coaching to reinforce those skills through a rigorous
coaching program.
Measuring
Enabling
CEB Insight
The traditional, checklist-approach QA no longer
meets the current needs for delivering the loweffort service experience.
Successful QA processes are built upon an
evaluation of broad core behaviors required for
low-effort interactions.
CEB Insight
Fostering an environment that embraces rep
judgment allows reps to hone their service skills
and deliver the low-effort service experience.
The best judgment-supporting environment is built
through creating strong peer networks that allow
reps to share successes and failures.
CEB Solution
Our QA Competency Framework includes 20
unique competencies that are mapped to the
Effortless Experience Skills Framework, helping
organizations identify the most relevant and
appropriate ones that reps should develop.
CEB Solution
Our research and best practices help create a
climate where frontline staff connect with their
peers, share best practices, and learn in the
moment from each other.
Measuring effort allows service organizations to gain a clear picture of the overall competency level of
frontline staff and identify which specific skills require further development, guiding actions toward specific
aspects of the talent management (e.g., hiring, developing) to reduce customer effort.
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Why Effort? Relatability

As mentioned earlier, by measuring effort, service organizations can identify where to
take action to create an effortless service experience. However, when it comes to taking
action, it is often not just within the service organization where changes must happen.
Service leaders face increasing amounts of collaboration with other business partners to
make service improvements (e.g., working with marketing teams to improve messaging on
websites so customers can better self-serve).
A key element in successful collaboration with other functions is relatability to the goal you
are working toward. The good news is that the idea of effort, as significant as it is to service
organizations, also applies to many other parts of the business. In fact, we have already
seen progressive sales organizations and marketing departments striving to make their own
interactions with customers as easy as possible. Therefore, by measuring and improving
something that other business partners also embrace, collaboration across functions will be
easier and more effective.
Progressive Sales Organizations Are Making Purchase

Experiences Easy
To increase their likelihood
of winning a high-quality
purchase, sales organizations
have to make it easy for
customers to buy.
Modern customers are armed with more high-quality information and options than
ever before. As much good as this new volume of information can provide, it is making
customers feel helpless and overwhelmed during the purchase process. Simply put, buying
is becoming harder for customers, and it is negatively impacting companies. It should come
as no surprise, then, in our analysis of over 600 B2B purchases, the single biggest thing that
sales organizations could do to increase their likelihood of winning a high-quality purchase
was to make it easy for customers to buy. Progressive sales organizations who make it easy
for customers to buy (high purchase ease) were 62% more likely to close a high-quality sale.
Impact of Purchase Easea on Suppliers Likelihood of Making a HighQuality Saleb

Indexed
2.00
1.00
1.62x
1.62
1.00x
1.00
0.00
Low Purchase Ease
High Purchase Ease
n = 610.
Source: CEB 2015 Sales Customer Panel Survey.
a
Purchase ease when a supplier made it easy for the organization to make this purchase.
High-quality Sale is defined an increase in chance of being selected as a winning supplier, and the customer 1) did
not settle for a less ambitious solution, or 2) purchased a premium offering relative to the base offering.
Note: Customer data controlled for brand, customer service, price/value ratio, and features and benefits.
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Progressive Marketing Functions Are Making Brand

Experiences Easy
If sales organizations deal with how to compel customers to purchase, marketing functions
then deal with how to make customers continue to purchase by building brand loyalty.
Facing similar challenges, marketing functions also find for many consumers the rising
volume of messages isnt helpingits overwhelming. As a result, many brands are seeing
less purchase intent, less follow-through on intent, and less intent to repurchase.
Decision simplicity is the

single biggest driver of
brand loyalty.
To improve brand loyalty, leading brands realize that consumers are overwhelmed by all
the choice and information out there. Instead of fighting for more attention, they make
choosing their brand so easy that consumers can actually think less about the decision.
Our analysis shows that the single biggest driver of brand loyalty, by far, is the ease for
consumers to gather trustworthy information and weigh their purchase options, also
known as decision simplicity.
Indeed, brands that score in the top quarter of the Decision Simplicity Index are 85% more
likely than those in the bottom quarter to be purchased by consumers.
Impact of Increased Decision Simplicity on Various Stickiness

Outcomes
Illustrative
25th Percentile Decision Simplicity

75th Percentile Decision Simplicity
Frequency
(Percentage)
100%
87%
95%
71%
67%
50%
36%
33%
0%
Follow-Through on
Purchase Intent
Repurchase
Recommendation
Effort measurement captures customer perspective at the point of the service interaction,
but this effort is often caused by decisions further upstream (a confusing marketing
campaign, for example) that needs to be fixed. You, as the service leader, inevitably need
support from other functions to either fix customer problems or enhance the service
experience. Measuring effort enables you not only to identify actions you should take but
also to better communicate with your internal partners to move things forward.
Additional Guidance
Our research shows that making things easy resonates widely and is a path forward within
business functions beyond customer service. To frame your conversations with business
partners on these findings and to position your requests for working together on effortreduction projects, it may help to understand more of where your business partners are
coming from. Understanding the main pain points driving shifts in your peers worlds will
help you better position effort reduction and making the interaction easy as is in your
peers interest. The next two sections provide a deeper look into the pain points that led
our sister research programs to incorporating ease and simplicity into sales and marketing
initiatives.
See next page for sales organization pain points that making it easy
can address.
See p. 13 for marketing function pain points that making it easy can
address.
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What Are Your Peers in Sales Organizations Struggling With?

Customers are armed with more high-quality information and options nowadays. As much good as this
increase in information provides, it also makes customers feel helpless and overwhelmed along the purchase
process. As a result, two pain points that sales functions face are extended buying cycle and customer
purchase regret. You can use these pain points to demonstrate the what's in it for me for the sales leader
and connect his or her work back to effort.
Pain 1: Extended Buying Cycle

Overabundance of information and options directly impacts sales cycle length. In fact, the actual
purchase length is 97% longer than the customers expected purchase length.
Buying Cycle Length, Expected Versus Actual

As Reported by Customers
Actual Purchase Length = 97% Longer
Customers Expected Purchase Length
Customers Actual Purchase Length
Beginning of Purchase
Purchase Decision
n = 610.
Pain 2: Customer Purchase Regret

Along with prolonged purchase length, customers are more likely to experience purchase regret.
Purchase regret drives negative advocacy for the company in the short term and reduces customer
loyalty in the long term.
Impact of Overwhelming Purchase Experience on Purchase Regret

7
Overwhelming Purchase Experience

Struggled to identify next steps
Group had difficult time making decisions
Excessively long
Presence of stall points/delays
Purchase Regret
Purchase Regret
Purchase failed to meet our expectations
Purchased less comprehensive solution than
we should have
Ultimately regretted making this purchase
1
1
Overwhelming Purchase Experience

n = 610.
12
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What Are Your Peers in Marketing Functions Struggling With?

As todays consumers are getting more web-savvyand switching cost is much lower, so customers can
pounce on whichever brand or store offers the best dealbrand loyalty is vanishing. In response, companies
have ramped up their messaging, expecting that the more information they provide, the better the chances
are of holding on to these increasingly distracted and disloyal customers. But for many consumers, the
rising volume of marketing messages isnt empoweringits overwhelming. You can use these pain points to
demonstrate the what's in it for me for the marketing leader and connect his or her work back to effort.
Pain 1: Less Brand Intent

Many brands are seeing less purchase intent, less follow-through on intent, and less intent to repurchase.
Technology-enabled shopping trends (e.g., mobile search, social buying, price comparison apps) suggest
that these problems will only get worse.
Q: Did You Have a Specific Brand in Mind When You Went Shopping?
All Purchases
15%
Simply Went Shopping
31%
Had a Brand in Mind
54%
Had a Product
in Mind
n = 4,361.
Pain 2: More Switching

Consumers are also more open to trying new brands and retailers56% of consumers say they are more
likely how to try out new stores, retail websites, or bands than they were five years agoleading to more
switching.
Q: Are You More or Less Likely Now to Try Out New Stores, Retail Websites, or Brands
Than you were Five Years Ago?
6%
Less Likely
56%
More Likely
38%
Same
n = 4,361.
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Key Takeaways and Supporting Information

This white paper was designed to give you a deeper understanding of the relationships and
attributes that make customer effort the top metric to measure in your service organization.
As you work to introduce customer effort internally, you can build the business case by
underscoring three key advantages of the metric:
1. Predictive validity
2. Actionability
3. Relatability
To support you as you take the first steps in measuring customer effort and building a loweffort system within your service organization, weve included the following additional
resources:
Survey questions to use in measurement

Stories of four companies that successfully measured effort and improved their service
experience
Questions to ask yourself as you begin to build the business case for customer effort
The Measurement
Since 2008, we have iterated our measurement of customer effort and continue to search
for the best questions to ask to capture the concept of effort and its relationship to business
outcomes. This exploration led us to develop our Customer Effort Index, consisting of the
below survey questions, equally weighted.
Ease of handling the request (CES 2.0)
The company made it easy for me to handle my request.
Perception that contacting the company was worth the customers effort
Contacting the company about this request was worth my effort.
Feeling the contact reason took less time than the customer expected
It took less time than I expected to handle this request.
Scale: (1Strongly Disagree, 7Strongly Agree)
The one question we most highly recommend and find to most correlate with loyalty is our
CES 2.0 question: The company made it easy for me to handle my request.
To capture feedback on effort from your customers, you have the option to utilize different
or multiple survey vehicles. You could switch out a question or two within a posttransaction survey to gather immediate data on effort to get a quick pulse of the current
state.
To understand effort more holistically, many of our members already take advantage
of the Effortless Experience Dashboarda robust survey engagement that measures
effort across channels and goes a step further in measuring effort driver performance as
well. Use this strategic survey to isolate high-effort areas and prioritize opportunities for
improvement.
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Case Studies
See how American Express and Reliant initiated new effort reduction strategies, among
which measuring effort was key.
By measuring effort throughout the service experience, LoyaltyOne was able to identify
the best opportunities to more effectively guide customers to best-fit channels and made
improvements that decreased customer effort and achieved cost savings.
After beginning to measure customer effort in its contact center, Kappa Company
recognized an opportunity to evolve its organizational culture in the customers best
interest. By partnering with us on Effortless Experience skill development, the firm was
able to increase performance against contact center goals and metrics and reduce customer
effort in the service experience.
Next Steps
To get you started down the path of effort measurement, ask yourself the following set of
questions, which are appropriate for service leaders beginning this process. Once these
questions have been answered, use the arguments within this white paper to support the
shift to measuring and decreasing customer effort in the service experience.
Who do you need to involve?
Would you need buy-in from other colleagues to survey customers on this new
concept?
Who would be the primary user of the measurement data collected?
Who should you educate on customer effort in order to make changes to the service
experience down the road?
What to measure and how?
Would introducing effort in a post-transaction survey or in a strategic service center

survey be more feasible in the near term?
Which of the effort index questions do you have space to ask, given your chosen
method of surveying?
Are there barriers to measuring effort?
Are there resource constraints on amount or scale of customer surveying, the ability to
analyze data, or IT capabilities?
Which functions would be more likely to resist a shift to customer effort? Which of the
three key advantages would best address their concerns?
15
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Building the Business Case

for Customer Effort

Why Customer Effort? Three Key Advantages

Mitigates disloyalty, and

Reduces the cost of resolving service requests.

Progressive sales organizations focus on making the sales process effortless.

Progressive marketing organizations drive brand loyalty by making purchase

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2015 CEB. All rights reserved.CCC3752615SYN

Why Measure Anything?

Why Effort? Predictive Validity

Customer Effort and Loyalty

Ability to Predict Customer Loyalty

Source: CEB 2012 Customer Loyalty Survey.

Impact of Customer Effort on NPS

Source: CEB 2012 Customer Loyalty Survey.

2015 CEB. All rights reserved.CCC3752615SYN

Customer Effort and Cost Savings

Cost to Serve by Customer Efforta Level

Total Cost to Resolve

Proven Relationship to Business Outcomes