Established model
The Customer Effort Score
Dixon, Freeman & Toman · 2010
Also known as CES
Ask how hard the customer had to work, because reducing effort predicts loyalty better than delighting does.
Its place in the frameworkOmni Core›Customer Feedback
What it does
The underlying study found that exceeding expectations in service barely moved loyalty, while making things difficult destroyed it — and that most service interactions are a chance to lose a customer rather than to win one. Measuring effort points attention at the same place: removing obstacles rather than adding delight.
- Reach for it when
- In support and self-service, where the ambition of delighting people is expensive and mostly wasted.
- Where it stops
- It measures one interaction, not the relationship. A product people love can be effortful, and effort is not always something the customer wants removed.
Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman & Nicholas Toman, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers”, Harvard Business Review, 2010.
Why it sits at Customer Feedback
What customers tell you about the experience: gathered where they will answer honestly, read for what it actually says, routed to whoever can act, and returned to the person who raised it.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- Gathering itSurvey-methodology work on response bias, and the difference between solicited and unsolicited feedback.
- Reading the signalQualitative coding practice, and the distinction between frequency and severity in reading complaint data.
- RoutingService-recovery and quality-management practice on routing to the process owner rather than to the point of contact.
- Closing the loopResearch on closed-loop feedback and its effect on both retention and subsequent response rates.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Customer Feedback lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Customer Journey MappingFeedback is the fastest way to find where the journey actually breaks.
- Business CoreMost feedback concerns a process, and acting on it means changing that process.
- Brand CorePerception research asks what people think; feedback tells you what happened to them.
- Data CoreFeedback is data with a known collection bias, and reading it requires knowing which.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Customer Feedback too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- The customer satisfaction indexSatisfaction estimated from several questions and placed in a chain, rather than read off a single answer.
- Net Promoter ScoreOne question — how likely are you to recommend us — scored so that the indifferent count for nothing.
Elsewhere in Omni Core
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
All 125 models