Contrary to what the market is accustoming us to, retaining a customer costs significantly less than acquiring a new one. Retention is not just a matter of product or price, but depends mainly on two interconnected factors: the level of customer satisfaction achieved and the effort required of the customer during interactions with the company. While satisfaction measures how well an experience met or exceeded expectations, customer effort assesses the ease with which the customer achieved his or her goal. Understanding and optimizing both of these dimensions is a crucial value-add in the customer service world today.
Customer satisfaction as an indicator of loyalty
Customer satisfaction represents the set of perceptions, evaluations and emotions that a customer develops after interacting with a product, service or brand. It is not a static figure, but a dynamic parameter that evolves through each touchpoint of the customer journey. According to
what Salesforce reports in one of its industry studies, this metric directly influences the likelihood of repurchase and the word of mouth, positive or negative, that the customer will generate.
Accurate measurement of satisfaction requires structured methodologies. The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is typically based on 5- or 7-point Likert scales and is taken immediately after specific interactions, such as closing a service ticket or completing a purchase. This metric provides granular feedback on individual episodes of the customer experience, enabling targeted and timely interventions.
Complementary metrics for a complete view
In addition to the CSAT, modern organizations integrate other metrics to build a well-rounded understanding of customer satisfaction. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer propensity to recommend the company, classifying respondents into promoters, passives and detractors. This metric is particularly effective in assessing long-term loyalty and identifying potential brand ambassadors.
Another relevant dimension is the retention rate, which calculates the percentage of customers who continue to do business with the company over a given period. Unlike survey-based metrics, retention rate offers an objective measure of actual customer behavior, reflecting the cumulative impact of all customer experiences. Monitoring this indicator along with the CSAT and NPS allows correlating stated perceptions and actual actions, identifying any discrepancies that require further investigation.
Critical factors determining satisfaction
Customer satisfaction does not depend on a single element, but emerges from the integration of multiple factors. The quality of the product or service obviously forms the basis, but equally crucial are:
- Speed of response: time-to-resolution in service requests significantly affects perception of service
- Personalization of the experience: the ability to recognize the customer and tailor interactions to the customer’s history and preferences
- Multichannel Consistency: ensuring a consistent and seamless experience across all contact channels
- Proactivity: anticipating the customer’s needs rather than just reacting to their requests
- Communication transparency: providing clear information on timelines, processes, and available solutions
The customer effort score: minimizing friction in the customer experience
The Customer Effort Score (CES) emerged as a key metric after research showed that ease of use influences loyalty more than does satisfaction in the narrow sense. Introduced by the Corporate Executive Board (now part of Gartner), CES measures the effort a customer must expend to solve a problem, complete a purchase, or get an answer.
The underlying logic is simple but powerful: every point of friction in the customer experience increases the likelihood of abandonment. A customer may be satisfied with the end result, but if achieving that result took too much time, too many steps, or too many transfers between operators, the overall experience is negative. CES is typically measured by direct questions such as “How easy was it to solve your problem?” on a scale of 1 (very difficult) to 7 (very easy).
How to reduce customer effort
Lowering customer effort requires a systemic rethinking of customer service processes. The most effective strategies include:
- Intelligent self-service: implement structured knowledge bases, dynamic FAQs and chatbots capable of autonomously resolving common queries, freeing operators to handle complex cases
- First Contact Resolution (FCR): optimize operational flows so that the operator receiving the request has the necessary information, expertise, and authorization to resolve it immediately, without transfer or escalation
- Contextual continuity: ensuring that the customer does not have to repeat information already provided when switching channels or interacting with different operators
- Intelligent routing: using algorithms that automatically route requests to the most qualified operator
based on the type of problem and available expertise - Automation of repetitive processes: eliminating time-consuming manual tasks through integration between systems and use of automated workflows
The correlation between CES and loyalty
Industry research shows that low CES (indicating high ease) correlates positively with retention and negatively with churn. Customers who have experienced low-effort experiences show a significantly higher likelihood of making repeat purchases and recommending the brand. In contrast, high-effort experiences generate frustration even when the problem is eventually resolved, damaging the long-term relationship.
One particularly interesting aspect is that CES turns out to be a more reliable predictor of loyalty than customer satisfaction in some contexts, especially in service interactions. This is because customers tend to remember negative effort more than positive satisfaction, a phenomenon known as “negativity bias” in cognitive psychology.
XCALLY: the omnichannel platform to optimize satisfaction and reduce effort
XCALLY is an omnichannel contact center solution developed specifically to improve both customer satisfaction and reduce customer effort through integrated, intelligent technologies. The platform unifies voice, email, chat, SMS, social media, and messaging apps into a single operator interface, eliminating communication silos that fragment the customer experience and increase the effort required.
XCALLY’s Openchannel architecture allows all customer interactions to be managed from a centralized console, ensuring contextual continuity: when a customer switches from chat to phone, the operator immediately views the full history of previous conversations, eliminating frustrating repetition. This ability to maintain context across channels dramatically reduces customer effort and accelerates resolution times.
The platform integrates advanced features of IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and skills-based intelligent routing, which automatically route each request to the most competent operator. This approach significantly increases the First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate, reducing the need for multiple transfers and ticket reopenings.
Real-time monitoring tools and analytics
XCALLY offers a comprehensive ecosystem of dashboards and reporting to continuously monitor customer satisfaction and effort metrics. Real-time monitoring tools enable supervisors to visualize in real time:
- Individual and team performance: metrics such as average handling time (AHT), first-contact resolution rate, number of transfers per interaction
- Levels of service: adherence to defined SLAs, wait times in queues, dropouts
- Load distribution: visualization of operator saturation to optimize resource allocation
- Sentiment analysis: automatic analysis of the emotional tone of conversations to identify critical situations requiring immediate action
This data does not remain confined to the contact center, but can be integrated with external CRM and business intelligence platforms through REST APIs and webhooks. Native integration with systems such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk and others allows the customer profile to be enriched with information from all business sources, enabling deeper personalization of the experience.
Artificial intelligence to reduce operator and customer effort
XCALLY incorporates components of artificial intelligence designed to automate repetitive tasks and support operators in making decisions. Embedded chatbots autonomously handle top-level requests, providing immediate responses 24/7 and reducing wait times. When the complexity of the request exceeds the bot’s capabilities, the transfer to the human operator occurs smoothly, with the entire conversational context passing automatically.
Automated voice call transcription and semantic analysis capabilities enable the extraction of valuable insights from interactions, identifying recurring patterns of dissatisfaction or complexity that require process optimization. This ability to continuously learn from implicit customer feedback makes XCALLY not only an operational tool, but an intelligence platform for continuous improvement of the customer experience.
Building loyalty through smooth and satisfying experiences
True customer loyalty is not built through points programs or temporary promotions, but through the consistent delivery of low-effort positive experiences. Every interaction presents an opportunity to strengthen or weaken the relationship: a problem solved quickly on first contact engenders trust, while cumbersome procedures or multiple transfers undermine the credibility of even the best product.
Organizations that excel in customer experience have realized that satisfaction and effort are not metrics to be monitored passively, but operational goals to be pursued through targeted technology investments and process redesign. Omnichannel platforms such as XCALLY provide the necessary technological foundation, but success also requires a cultural commitment to customer-centricity.
XCALLY offers a concrete path to transforming the contact center from a cost center to an engine of competitive differentiation by providing enterprise technologies in a modular and scalable platform.
