Measuring Customer Effort—Why It Matters and 5 Ways To Make It Easy

A smiling woman in an office taking notes on customer effort with an abstract upward trending graph overlaid

Think about the last time you had an easy, stress-free customer experience. A new smartphone was mailed to your home to self-activate, and it automatically synced your contacts, apps, images, and more. Or, when you returned a product with just a few taps on an app and left the package on your front porch for pickup.

Contrast that with a broadband support experience with long hold times, multiple transfers, difficulty troubleshooting, etc.

Connecting Customer Effort and Churn

Companies succeed when they create memorable moments and remove friction at every step. Every extra step adds frustration, and when subscribers feel like it’s too hard to get what they need, they churn.

That’s where Customer Effort Score (CES) comes in. How difficult was it for the customer to complete their desired action? Unlike Net Promoter Score^SM (NPS^®) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), CES focuses on ease of experience, measuring how simple (or frustrating) it is for subscribers to get what they need.

Broadband service providers (BSPs) often prioritize NPS or CSAT over CES, assuming satisfaction reflects ease of service. But subscribers can be happy with a support outcome while still being frustrated by the effort it took to get there. Leaning into CES will reflect positively on your NPS.

Identifying High-Effort Customer Interactions

CES is also important in your evolutionary journey to become a broadband experience provider (BXP). You cannot deliver improved experiences if you don’t consider how to measure them. However, we know that data siloed across touchpoints makes CES difficult to implement—complicating the tracking of customer effort throughout the subscriber journey.

Instead, a good first step is to focus on awareness and getting every team—across marketing, support, and operations—to think about the customer effort. With this mindset in place, map out the memorable moments in your customer journey and consider a proxy to collect data on the customer’s effort at each step.

For example, you can spot friction by examining:

How much customer effort is required to find product information on your website? An online satisfaction survey could improve navigation.
How much effort is required by the customer during installation? A quick post-install survey can surface hidden pain points.
How difficult is it to file a support ticket? Utilize your website analytics or consider a small test group with real users, how many clicks does it take?

5 Ways To Deliver Effortless Experiences

Reducing effort isn’t just about making subscribers happy; it’s about creating a smooth service experience, so they never have to think about it. Here are five ways you can intentionally focus on customer effort by reducing friction and gain insight into opportunities for improvement.

Increase first call resolution. Ensure support teams have end-to-end visibility into the subscriber experience, enabling them to solve problems quickly in a single call.
Streamline self-service. Invest in intuitive, easy-to-use apps and online tools so subscribers can handle basic tasks themselves—reducing calls to support.
Minimize cold handoffs. Ensure seamless handoffs to other teams—and ensure that everyone has the same information—so subscribers don’t have to repeat themselves.
Measure effort directly. The only way to improve a metric is to set a baseline. Ask subscribers, “How easy was it to resolve your issue today?”
Follow up proactively. A simple check-in after a service interaction, such as a quick email or phone survey, builds trust and prevents future frustration.

Identify your memorable moments, map out proxies to collect information on the customer effort and share across teams, and then take steps to reduce the effort—or, better yet, make it effortless—and you will build lasting customer loyalty.

Net Promoter^®, NPS^®, NPS Prism^®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score℠ and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.