The Customer Effort Score (CES) appears to be the new shiny object among customer experience professionals. With the urgency to simplify products and services, an attraction to this metric seems logical.
But, before you go adding another question to your voice of customer program, take a step back and see if there are existing metrics that you can use as an indicator of customer effort. Metrics that measure time, speed, and resources (e.g., time to purchase, time to install, product downtime, and time to resolve an issue) are great indicators of effort, as long as you are measuring them from the customer point-of-view.
Customer experience professionals need to think about the voice of customer in broader terms than a survey. It's about leveraging all of the intelligence available to deliver an experience that customers value, recognize, and reward. Before you go adding another question to your survey, start by looking at the existing data to determine if it can help inform your business challenge.
For more information about the difference between CES and NPS, check out this post from Bruce Temkin.
Photo credit: Seongbin Im