Making things easy for customers is the right goal. The famous single-question survey built to measure it predicts retention poorly. Measure effort by what customers had to do.
In 2010 Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nick Toman published “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” in Harvard Business Review. Its argument has held up. Its metric hasn’t.
From a study of more than 75,000 people who had used contact centers or self-service, the authors concluded that going above and beyond made little difference to loyalty; customers wanted their problem solved simply. Among customers who reported low effort, 94% said they intended to buy again, 88% that they’d spend more, and only 1% that they’d speak badly of the company Reported. Their prescriptions: head off the next likely problem, stop making customers switch channels, attend to how the customer feels, learn from those who struggled, and put solving ahead of speed. A customer who writes twice or repeats their order number to a second agent has done work that was yours to do.
The article proposed a Customer Effort Score, one survey question on how much effort the customer spent, reported to predict loyalty better than satisfaction or the Net Promoter Score. That claim failed an independent test. Evert de Haan, Peter Verhoef and Thorsten Wiesel compared the three metrics on customers of 93 firms in 18 industries and tracked who stayed. The effort score “in itself has little to no predictive power and performs the worst of all” the metrics studied, even among customers who had actually contacted the company. Top-two-box satisfaction, the share who gave one of the two highest scores, predicted retention best Published.
Reduce effort as a design rule. Don’t adopt a one-question effort score as your loyalty metric.
The authors’ caution is about scope: the effort question asks about one past interaction, while retention depends on the whole relationship, including the delivery that caused the contact. The contact is a symptom; its effort is a symptom of the symptom.
Your help desk already records effort:
| Measure | Defined as | What it catches |
|---|---|---|
| Repeat contact rate | Contacts about the same order within 7 days of a previous one, over all contacts | First answers that didn’t resolve it |
| Contacts per resolution | Contacts, over issues marked solved | Back-and-forth to get one thing done |
| Channel switches | Issues touched in more than one channel, over all issues | Chat that sends people to email, email that sends them to phone |
| Transfers | Contacts handed to a second person, over all contacts | Agents without the authority to finish |
Repeat contacts are FedEx’s “complaints reopened,” weighted 5 in its index and in the one in chapter 3. If you survey after contacts, report the top-two-box share, which predicted retention best in de Haan’s study.
This is one chapter of The Kept Promise, which is free and readable in full on a single page with no form in front of it.