I read an interesting article prepared by the conference board on a metric that they are recommending for measuring customer disloyalty!
According to Matthew Dixon, managing director for the Customer Contact Council, the Customer Effort Score (CES) is based on a single question that determines the degree of required customer effort during a service request.
Instinctively, I find this metric appealing when I take into consideration my own interactions with service providers. Sometimes, when I deal with a bank, the effort required from my side to get my account details, get some new service activated or get wrong transactions reversed is so time consuming, it almost looked like they are doing a favour with " my money"! It always triggered a thought in me to change the bank. So is the case with mobile phone service or utility providers where literally there is no face to talk or interact and everything is handled over the phone or internet and literally I am at the mercy of IVRS systems, tele-execs with set scripts & process in front of them.
What would be interesting is to see how do they define effort for each service category as it will be very different for every category and weightages that they give to an effort which leads to the most disloyal behaviour.
But, this is a good starting point for companies to start defining and tracking CES scores of their customers and looking at attrition!