Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers
Abstract
Based on research with 75,000+ customers, the authors find that delighting customers doesn't build loyalty — reducing effort does. The Customer Effort Score (CES) is a superior predictor of repurchase behavior and wallet share versus CSAT or NPS. Companies should focus on making interactions easy rather than exceeding expectations.
★ Curator Summary
Dixon et al.'s research flipped CX strategy on its head: stop trying to delight, start reducing effort. For WFM, the implication is profound — Customer Effort Score provides an empirical proxy for the 'price' in effort-demand elasticity. When AI reduces effort (CES improves), demand for service increases along the effort-demand curve. The finding that 57% of inbound calls stem from customers failing online validates the failure demand thesis and quantifies the channel-confusion tax.
Why It Matters
CES gives WFM practitioners a measurable input for demand elasticity modeling. If you track CES across channels, you can empirically estimate epsilon_effort = %deltaVolume / %deltaCES. This transforms the abstract concept of 'induced demand' into a metric you can track and predict with. The 57% failure demand finding also means more than half your volume is potentially addressable not through AI deflection but through fixing broken digital journeys.
Caveats
CEB's research methodology isn't fully public. The CES metric has been challenged by NPS proponents. The relationship between effort reduction and volume increase isn't explicitly modeled in this paper — that's our application of their framework. The 75,000 customer sample is large but from CEB client companies, introducing selection bias.
Discussion
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