Customer effort: why a hard resolution costs more than a slow reply

The work starts after they have made contact

Before anyone gets in touch, a website can already make people work: hunting for a phone number, guessing whether you cover their area, deciding whether the business looks current. That kind of effort is covered in why the psychology of a first visit matters more than a prettier design.

This article starts later. The customer has called, emailed or sent the form. The question is no longer whether they can find you. It is whether getting the matter settled will be straightforward or will become a second job.

A reply that says "we have received your message" tells them the message arrived. It does not tell them the boiler will be looked at, the invoice will be corrected, or the quote they asked for will turn up on the day you named. Speed of acknowledgement and effort of resolution are different clocks.

What showed up in UK energy and broadband

The clearest recent UK picture of this kind of effort comes from essential services, not from local trades. Which? published research on 26 September 2024 into energy and broadband customer service. Yonder surveyed 4,101 UK adults, described as nationally representative, between 3 and 15 May 2024. People were asked about problems in the previous year. Which? then scaled the results using ONS population estimates.

Among people who had contacted their provider, 35 percent in energy and 36 percent in broadband said at least one problem had wasted their time. The problems named were not being able to reach customer service, calls being disconnected, being passed between departments, and long waits. Which? estimated that energy and broadband customers spent 27.3 million hours on these issues over the year: 13.9 million hours in energy and 13.4 million hours in broadband.

Separately, Which? estimated £298 million of consumer financial harm across the two sectors. That is its estimate of customers left worse off, including people who gave up trying to resolve a problem and people who did not get in touch because an earlier experience had been poor. It is not revenue those companies lost, and it is not a cost figure for a plumber, an accountant or a shop. A local service business should not borrow the pound total. The ordinary pattern is still useful: when contact itself becomes the work, some people stop.

What a small firm can watch

Which? was not scoring independent local businesses, so there is no honest league table to copy. The problems it recorded do suggest a few questions that are more informative than a single average reply time.

Did the customer's actual issue get settled? How many attempts did that take? Did they have to repeat information the business already had? Were they passed between people? Did a promised next step happen? Did they give up?

None of those is a standard trust score. They are a way of noticing effort that a fast first response can hide. A business can answer every new enquiry within an hour and still leave last week's customer chasing a callback.

Dixon, Freeman and Toman's argument was about loyalty in contact centres: people stay, they suggested, when the resolution is less of a burden, even if nobody has tried to delight them. Loyalty and trust are different things. A customer who comes back because the last problem was easy to sort out is giving you one kind of evidence. A customer who comes back because there was nowhere else to go is giving you another. The HBR article does not separate those cases, and it does not measure either of them in a small local firm.

A pleasant extra does not clear a stuck problem

Delight has a place. A careful job, a fair price and a note that shows someone was paying attention can all strengthen a relationship. They do not stand in for a resolution. If the customer is still waiting on the part, the refund or the visit you said would happen, another gesture is a side issue. The effort is still theirs.

For a small business the useful check is modest. Take a recent complaint or a quote that went quiet. Some jobs genuinely need more than one conversation: a quote, then a date, then a visit. The contact that matters here is the avoidable one, where the customer has to come back because nothing happened after the last exchange. A fast first reply can still hide that.

If you want that looked at against how your own enquiries are handled, how I help includes the stretch after someone has already made contact, not only the page they saw first.

References and further reading

1. Dixon, Freeman and Toman (2010), Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers, Harvard Business Review. Practitioner article on customer effort in service and contact centres. No figures from this article are used here.
2. Which? (26 September 2024), energy and broadband customers and poor customer service. UK survey evidence on time and consumer financial harm in two essential-service sectors. The £298 million is estimated consumer harm, not business revenue.