Customer effort can be described as the act of mobilizing physical, intellectual, or moral force to overcome resistance encountered in interactions with a company or brand, whether during a purchase, customer support, or product use. According to research by Matthew Dixon, author of the article “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” published in Harvard Business Review, it is more advantageous and profitable to minimize customer effort than to try to delight them at all costs. The perception and importance of customer effort vary considerably from one industry to another.
In the banking sector, for example, facilitating the procedures and formalities associated with switching banks and transferring salary is identified as a crucial element of customer effort in the acquisition strategies of banking networks. Similarly, in the telecommunications and energy sectors, reducing customer effort and simplifying processes are major priorities for players in these industries. Configuring a feature within a mobile application can also be seen as a form of customer effort, as illustrated in the video below.
Customer effort can have a purely cognitive dimension, relating to the effort required to process an excessive amount of information. Many companies, particularly in the telecommunications and energy sectors, strive to simplify their offerings to reduce the cognitive processing effort required from customers. When it becomes excessive, customer effort can be perceived as a source of frustration (pain point) or even a major obstacle to customer satisfaction.
Today, customer effort is increasingly integrated into customer journey optimization, giving rise to initiatives such as the Customer Effort Score (CES) and the index of…
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