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Research · Customer understanding

Customer effort versus delight: what the research actually shows

By BREME · · 6 minute read

In short

A 2010 study of more than 75,000 customers found that exceeding expectations in service made people only marginally more loyal, while high effort pushed them away. The Customer Effort Score came out of it. Later evidence is more mixed: a peer-reviewed Dutch study found the score predicted retention poorly, and Forrester links emotion most closely to loyalty. Our reading: remove effort first, then design the few moments where customers need to feel looked after.

Who this is for: CX leads, service and operations managers and executives in membership bodies, multi-site clinics, utilities, financial and professional services firms and subscription brands who decide what to measure and where to invest in the journey.

The study that changed how service is measured

In the July to August 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review, Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman published Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers. They worked for the Customer Contact Council, part of the Corporate Executive Board (CEB).

Over three years their team surveyed more than 75,000 business and consumer customers about recent service interactions by phone, voice prompts, web, chat and email. The companies spanned dozens of industries in North America, Europe, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. They also ran several hundred structured interviews with service leaders.

The headline finding was blunt. Exceeding expectations during a service interaction, with a refund, a free product or free express shipping, made customers only marginally more loyal than simply meeting their needs. Yet 89 of the 100 service heads surveyed said exceeding expectations was their main strategy, and 84% of customers said their expectations had not been exceeded in their most recent interaction.

Satisfaction was a poor guide too. Twenty percent of 'satisfied' customers said they intended to leave, and 28% of 'dissatisfied' customers intended to stay. The authors also found customers were four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal than loyal.

What effort meant, and where the score came from

The authors defined effort as the work customers must do to get a problem solved. The obstacles were familiar: 62% of customers reported contacting the company repeatedly, 59% being transferred, 57% switching from the web to the phone and 56% having to explain their issue again.

To measure it they proposed the Customer Effort Score, a single question: 'How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?', scored from 1 (very low) to 5 (very high). They reported that it outperformed both satisfaction and the Net Promoter Score in predicting loyalty after service interactions.

Of customers who reported low effort, 94% said they intended to buy again, 88% said they would spend more and 1% said they would speak negatively about the company. Of those who had a hard time, 81% said they intended to spread negative word of mouth.

The article recommended five tactics. Head off the next issue, since 22% of repeat calls involved related downstream problems. Prepare staff for the emotional side of calls, since 24% of repeat calls came from emotional disconnects. Reduce channel switching, because 57% of inbound calls came from customers who had tried the website first. Learn from unhappy customers. And focus on solving the problem, not on speed.

What the 2010 study did not show

The study has limits that are easy to lose when it is quoted. The authors defined loyalty as intention: whether customers said they would keep doing business, spend more or speak well of the company. It did not track what they actually did. And by the authors' own account, the research focused only on contact centre and self-service interactions, not the whole relationship.

In 2012 the researcher Guy Fielding, writing in Call Centre Helper, pointed out that HBR is not a peer-reviewed journal and that the article gives little detail on how effort was measured. He reported that in his own replication work, effort added predictive value but was never the strongest single predictor. Combinations of measures did better, including task resolution and the high and low emotional moments of a call.

One more caution. A widely repeated figure says 96% of customers with high-effort service become disloyal, compared with 9% after low effort. It is usually attributed to Gartner, but we could not trace it to a primary page we were able to open. The figure we could verify from the 2010 article is the 81% intending negative word of mouth.

Later evidence: a more mixed picture

The most rigorous test we found is a peer-reviewed study by Evert de Haan, Peter Verhoef and Thorsten Wiesel, published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing in 2015. In September 2010, 6,649 Dutch consumers completed 8,924 evaluations of 93 service firms across 18 industries. Two years later the researchers asked who had stayed.

Top-two-box satisfaction, the share of customers giving one of the two highest scores, was the best single predictor of retention. The Customer Effort Score had little to no predictive power and performed worst of all the measures. Only 20.5% of customers had contacted their firm with a request, so most could not answer the effort question at all. Even among those who had, it still came last. Combining it with satisfaction measures did improve predictions, and the authors recommend a dashboard of measures over any single score.

The measure itself has also changed. Jeff Sauro of MeasuringU noted in 2019 that the newer version uses a seven-point agree or disagree scale about how easy the company made things, and no longer uses the word effort.

Gartner has kept refining the argument. In a 2020 release, republished by CustomerThink, it said a high-effort service experience dropped the probability of a customer staying to 37%, and that about 40% of customers would still leave even after a high-quality experience. Service teams that also focused on value enhancement, such as teaching better uses of the product, confirming the purchase was right and anticipating the next need, could lift the probability of staying to 82%. Gartner's Brent Adamson said a great service experience can at best only mitigate disloyalty.

Forrester measures ease alongside effectiveness and emotion in its CX Index. In an August 2025 Australian Marketing Institute article, Forrester's Martin Gill said emotion is most correlated with loyalty outcomes like retention, enrichment and advocacy. Forrester's 2026 US index found emotion made the largest gain of the three, up 1.4 percentage points.

Effort or emotion? Mostly both

These findings are less contradictory than they look. The 2010 study and Gartner's later work describe service as mostly a source of disloyalty: get it wrong and people leave, get it right and you have mostly avoided damage. That is a floor, and effort is a good way to find where you are falling through it.

Forrester's emphasis on emotion is not an argument for the costly giveaways the 2010 authors criticised. Even the original study counted emotional disconnects as a major cause of repeat contact. A journey that makes people chase, repeat themselves and switch channels rarely leaves them feeling valued.

The de Haan study adds the measurement lesson. Effort is a narrow, after-the-fact read on one service contact. It should sit beside a relationship measure and, above all, beside what customers actually do.

What it means for designing a journey

When we work on a journey with effort in mind, these are the practical moves:

  • Map effort across the whole event, not one call. Count repeat contacts, transfers, channel switches and the times a customer has to explain again. The 2010 article reports Bell Canada cut calls per event by 16% and churn by 6% by anticipating related issues.
  • Design for the next question. For each common request, list what customers usually need next and answer it before they have to ask.
  • Follow the web-to-phone leak. Pull the reasons for calls from customers who tried the website first, and fix those pages before adding new channels.
  • Treat emotional moments on purpose. Mark the points with high stakes or bad news, and give staff the words and permission to handle them well.
  • Add value once the problem is solved. Gartner's research suggests help with getting more from the product matters beyond fixing the issue.
  • Measure with more than one number. Use effort after service contacts, a relationship measure such as top-box satisfaction, and actual retention behaviour, and check which one predicts what your customers do.

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