I just wrote a news story for destinationCRM on a joint effort between 24/7 Customer and the Corporate Executive Board to develop a business intelligence tool around CEB’s customer effort scoring. For those of you not familiar with it, the customer effort dashboard looks at the amount of effort a customer must expend to have his issue resolved and how that affects his customer satisfaction and loyalty.

To come up with this scoring matrix, Corporate Executive Board conducted a study involving more than 75,000 consumers who had interacted with a company over the phone, the Web, chat, or email. CEB also held hundreds of structured interviews with customer service leaders in large companies throughout the world. The goal of the research was to find out how important customer service is to overall brand loyalty, which customer service activities have an impact on loyalty, and how companies can increase loyalty without raising operating costs.

In doing so, two items emerged that should give pause to customer service professionals: First, CEB found that delighting customers doesn’t necessarily create a loyal following; reducing their effort—the number of hoops they must go through to get their issue resolved—does. Second, acting on this insight, often on an agent-by-agent basis, can help improve customer service and loyalty.

Sounds pretty intuitive to me.