Organisations dealing with Customer Experience Management (CEM) are confronted with the question of how they can measure the actual customer experience. They often lack effective and accurate means of measuring the customer experience. Therefore it is difficult to show the return on investment (ROI) and because of that they don’t give CEM full attention.

Customer satisfaction and loyalty can be one way of measuring the customer experience. It’s easy to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty by themselves, but measuring them alone does not allow a business to influence or change the key aspects of customer experience.

Customer Satisfaction and loyalty surveys don’t provide the depth of insight that customer experience management does because it often only seeks general feedback on the organisation, its products, services and/or brands (Espana, 2006). With these surveys it is difficult to measure the emotional impact of the customer relationship. As more and more organisations acknowledge the fact that customer satisfaction is not sufficient for measuring the customer experience, they are looking for better ways to measure the actual performance of each transaction at every touch-point and at each step of the process. Organisations move away from efficiency based metrics (how fast did we do it?) towards effectiveness based metrics (how did we do?) (Kolsky, 2007). This requires additional ways to measure the customer experience.

Now there seems to be a new way of measuring the customer experience which might be better than using the traditional customer satisfaction metrics and Net Promoter Score. This metric is called the Customer Effort Score (CES). The CES, invented by the Corporate Executive Board, is based on a single question that determines the degree of required customer effort during any interaction the customer has with an organization. The CES metric was derived from a survey amongst 18,000 customers.

Unfortunately it is proprietary and the data used for deriving it is not publicly available. What intrigues me is how this Works? How can you measure the effort a customer has to make by just one single question? What is the methodology behind it? If you have any thoughts or experience regarding CES let me know.