Customer Effort is a measurement of how easy a business is for consumers to engage with.

The metric provides a deep understanding of a brand’s customer service, offering more robust insight into the effectiveness of a company’s customer experience than other metrics, such as NPS.

We believe that Effort makes up 30% of customer loyalty. The great news for brands is that every building block that influences a positive Effort score is completely under your control.

The results

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The Results

Here are the Customer Effort Index rankings by sector and region, then the top brands in the UK, US and Australia by sector. Look for the starburst icon for overall Effort scores.

Customer Effort: The Markets View

Telecommunications

Australia

Financial Services

Australia

Technology Retail

Australia

Top brands in the US

Telecommunications

Financial Services

Technology Retail

Top brands in the UK

Telecommunications

Financial Services

Technology Retail

Top brands in Australia

Telecommunications

Financial Services

Technology Retail

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Chris Dillon

Editor,
Customer Effort Index

Inside Track

Quick quiz: Which Telco brand had an advert in the early 2000s featuring a man dancing around on a beach while writing “How daft am I?” to celebrate the launch of text messaging?

I’m not sure why, 25 years on, that advert remains firmly lodged in my mind, but with Vodafone taking the top position in the Telco tables in Australia, the UK and the US in this wave's data – the first time any global brand has done so since we began the Customer Effort Index – it appears memorable ads aren't the only thing the brand does well.

The Customer Effort Index is back and once again features plenty of reshuffling from the movers and shakers in the Telco, Technology Retail and Financial Services industries, according to 18,000 consumers in each wave of data.

Technology Retail in the US has a new market leader (Apple), our biggest score ever has been recorded in Financial Services in the UK (Nationwide, First Direct) and one brand in the Financial Services in Australia table has added +7 points to its Overall Effort Score wave on wave (Alex).

So dive right in and find out which of the 100 brands we measure are the easiest to do business with.

How it Works

The Customer Effort Index is based on interviews with 18,000 consumers across the UK, US and Australia each year.

In-depth surveys ask respondents to rate their most recent interaction with a brand according to several dimensions e.g. “making me feel valued as a customer” and “having details explained clearly to you”.

These are then tallied to form our four pillars within Customer Effort: (1) Knowledge & Expertise (2) Style of Communication (3) Speed solving the problem (4) Valuing the Customer.

Responses are collected online.

About the Customer Effort Index

NICE believes that a great customer experience is an effortless one, where life is made as easy as possible for the customer. NICE commissioned the Customer Effort Index to measure how real people perceive the effort it takes to be a customer of some of the leading brands in the world. By enabling a comparison of effort not only within an industry, but across industries, we can identify and learn from the brands who lead on making it easy for their customers to do business with them.