In today‘s highly competitive business landscape, providing an excellent customer experience can be a key competitive advantage. Customer retention and loyalty depend heavily on how easy and satisfying customers find their interactions with your company to be. This is where tracking Customer Effort Score (CES) becomes vitally important.
This comprehensive guide will cover everything you need to know about Customer Effort Score including:
- What CES is and why it matters
- How to accurately measure CES
- Factors that influence CES
- Proven strategies for improving CES
- Best practices for acting on CES feedback
- How to continually optimize CES as part of an overall customer experience management strategy
Understanding and acting on CES is a must for any forward-thinking business that wants to drive growth through customer loyalty. Let‘s dive in!
What Exactly is Customer Effort Score (CES)?
Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that quantifies how much effort customers have to expend to do business with your company. It provides insights into the ease or difficulty of customer interactions across channels like your website, mobile apps, phone support, retail locations, etc.
CES is measured through direct customer feedback surveys where they are asked to rate the perceived effort involved in activities like:
- Finding information on your website
- Purchasing products
- Getting support for issues
- Resolving billing questions
- Making returns/exchanges
- And more
The most commonly used scale for CES surveys is 1-5 or 1-7 points ranging from "very difficult" to "very easy". By tracking how customers rate interactions over time, you gain visibility into obstacles and friction points impacting their experience.
Analyzing CES trends also provides leading indicators about customer satisfaction, loyalty and future business. That‘s what makes Customer Effort Score such a vital metric that all CX leaders need to measure.
Why Customer Effort Score Matters
There are a number of compelling reasons why brands should care about and measure Customer Effort Score including:
It Predicts Loyalty & Referrals
Studies show that CES has 1.8x more correlation with customer loyalty than traditional satisfaction (CSAT) surveys. 71% of customers reporting high effort say they will likely switch to a competitor in future. Not only that but 88% of customers with low-effort interactions would actively promote your brand through recommendations.
It Impacts Future Spend & Purchase Intent
Customers gravitate towards brands that make their lives easier. 94% of customers reporting low CES say they would likely make additional purchases in future compared to just 4% reporting high effort. For recurring revenue businesses, reducing customer effort leads directly to higher lifetime value.
It Has Quantifiable ROI
By being able to quantify metrics like digital adoption, service case reopen rates and contact to resolution time, you can tie improvements in Customer Effort Score to hard dollar impacts. Studies show $1 decrease in customer effort equals $9-13 increase in yearly revenue per customer.
Those are just some of the reasons why CES is quickly becoming one of the most insightful metrics for customer experience success. It provides actionable insights into pain points plus leading indicators of retention and referrals.
How to Calculate Your Customer Effort Score
Now that you know why CES is such an indispensable CX metric, let‘s walk through how to actually measure it. Calculating your overall Customer Effort Score involves four key steps:
Step 1) Survey Customers
The first step is running regular CES surveys to capture direct customer feedback. These surveys should be short, easy to complete and framed in relation to a recent customer interaction or transaction. Example questions include:
- On a scale of 1-7, how much effort did you have to put forth to purchase from our website today?
- How easy or difficult was it to get your issue resolved by our service center?
- How seamless and effortless was your in-store checkout experience today?
Surveys can be administered via email, SMS, pop-ups or indignant modes. Just ensure they are timed to be taken immediately following an interaction.
Step 2) Craft Effective Questions
Put thought into crafting rating questions that are:
- Relevant to a specific interaction
- Avoid assumptions or generalizations
- Quantify effort on an intuitive rating scale
Stick to just 1-3 targeted CES questions as you don‘t want to overburden customers with lengthy surveys.
Step 3) Survey at the Right Times
To get an accurate pulse, CES surveys should be taken immediately following an interaction. Potential trigger points include:
- After phone/chat/email support
- Post checkout on your website
- Upon entering/exiting a retail location
- After loading an app or accessing account
- Following an inbound sales call
Identify milestones across channels to tie surveys to for optimal relevance.
Step 4) Calculate Average CES
With survey responses gathered over time, your overall CES metric is calculated as the average rating across all responses.
For example, if your ratings were (10 surveys taken):
8, 7, 10, 6, 5, 4, 10, 2, 7, 3
The aggregate Customer Effort Score would be:
(8 + 7 + 10 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 10 + 2 + 7 + 3) / 10 = 62 / 10 = 6.2 CES
Now that you know the methodology, let‘s examine key drivers and proven ways to improve this important metric.
Factors Influencing Your Customer Effort Score
Many elements across the customer journey influence the perceptions of effort customers have. Identifying specific pain points and friction is critical for improving CES. Some common factors affecting customer effort include:
Difficult Website Experiences
When customers have to hunt for information, go through confusing flows or face error messages, it dramatically increases perceived effort. Ensuring navigation, search and forms are optimized based on analytics and testing is essential.
Complicated Sign-Up/Registration
Lengthy forms requiring extensive data entry adds unnecessary friction for customers. Simplify fields to just essential info and leverage data you already have where possible.
Hard-to-Use Mobile Apps
If your apps have small links, confusing menus and don‘t leverage gestures/scrolling customers already know, interactions become tedious chores. Review UX design through usability testing.
Long Wait Times
Sitting on hold or dealing with delays after inquiry submission is universally seen as painful by customers. Set clear SLAs internally and provide wait time transparency/expectations externally.
Repeated Contacts to Resolve Issues
Nothing amplifies effort like customers having to re-explain an issue or recount details across multiple contacts. Empower staff for first contact resolution and leverage cross-channel knowledge management.
Those elements highlight how CES is ultimately about minimizing everything your customers have to do across interactions.
Proven Strategies for Improving Customer Effort Score
Now let‘s explore proven ways companies can improve Customer Effort Scores leveraging four key strategies:
#1) Build a Customer-Centric Culture
The foundation for minimizing customer effort is establishing an organization-wide service culture centered around customer needs. This means things like:
– Empowering Staff to Resolve Issues
Give reps latitude to fix a problem versus sticking strictly to policy. Set quotas based on first call resolutions versus average handle time.
– Proactively Listening to Customers
See feedback and reviews as opportunities versus complaints. Facilitate closed-loop communication and know what percentage of issues raised on social get addressed.
– Aligning KPIs to Effort Reduction
Base incentives and departmental objectives on making key tasks easier. Marketing‘s goal could be improving site search relevancy. Sales might optimize demo scheduling.
– Ongoing Experience Improvement Processes
Build voice of customer analysis and journey mapping exercises into regular operating rhythms. Set monthly or quarterly meetings to comb through drivers of effort.
Transforming culture takes work but pays exponential dividends as it rallies staff at all levels around the north star of lowering customer effort.
#2) Make Reaching You Seamless
Another critical strategy is ensuring customers can get timely support or answers across any channel they choose to engage you in. Key tactics to drive adoption and reduce perceived effort include:
– Offer Omnichannel Customer Service
Make it easy for customers to move between email, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger and phone without having to re-explain an issue.
– Invest in Robust Self-Service
For common questions, an up-to-date knowledge base with chatbots or virtual agents provides instant resolutions without customers waiting on hold.
– Staff Service Channels Based on Preferences
Monitor peak demand periods by channel and align staffing to match inbound inquiry volumes, avoiding delays.
– Proactively Notify Customers of Issues
If a shipment will be late or an appointment needs to be rescheduled, text or email customers quickly so they don‘t have to chase you down.
Delivering on-demand support over channels your customers already use amplifies convenience and cuts down repetitive contacts.
#3) Continually Improve Customer Service
While culture and digitization set a baseline, refining your human-powered service remains integral for sustainable CES gains. Some best practices include:
– First Contact Resolution (FCR) Management
Target meeting 80%+ FCR rates as it demonstrably reduces back-and-forth contacts for customers. Diagnose drivers through call analytics.
– Ongoing Agent Training & Coaching
Leverage call monitoring, screen recordings and test scenarios to sharpen soft skills, troubleshooting and service polish.
– Up-to-Date Knowledge Management
When answers exist in one spot for common customer questions, call volume drops as does repetition of issues. Maintain a searchable, centrally managed knowledge base.
– Proactive Outreach Triggers
Set rules to automatically notify customers of order/service changes versus them chasing updates. CES leaders self-serve information to customers.
While digital channels rise in usage, human interactions remain integral for resolving complex issues. Providing quick, comprehensive and compassionate support should be the ultimate goal of teams.
#4) Know Your Customers Better
Finally, a key strategy less discussed is actually understanding the drivers behind why customers contact you. Some leading ways to home in on reducing intrinsic customer effort include:
– Develop Detailed Customer Personas
Go beyond firmographic attributes to paint pictures of motivations, challenges and channel preferences across segments. Guide interactions based on person-specific journeys.
– Perform Voice of Customer Analysis
Don‘t just tally complaints but actually map out end-to-end processes customers go through. Where are consistent pain points reported across a journey? Prioritize fixes based on negative sentiment clusters.
– Conduct Regular Journey Mapping Sessions
Gather insights teams, frontline staff and savvy customers to diagram ideal versus actual interactions. How can failure demand be reduced through easier onboarding or education for instance?
Truly addressing drivers of customer effort requires getting to root causes beyond surveys. Combining analytics, human insights and outside-in perspectives pays dividends for sustainably better CES over time.
Best Practices for Customer Effort Score Surveys
To gather accurate, nuanced CES data that actually leads to improvements, some proven approaches include:
– Ask Specific Interaction-Based Questions
Pose rating questions in the context of a channel used like "How difficult was it to __ on our website?" Generic assessments of overall experience aren‘t as directionally useful.
– Send Surveys During Optimal Trigger Points
Immediately following an interaction yields most accurate perceptions versus days later. Identify milestone events per processes to set automated triggers.
– Keep Survey Length Short
Limit effort questions to 3-5 tops. You‘ll get higher response rates if you don‘t overload customers upfront. Follow-up for more details on low ratings later.
– Incent Response Completion
Consider embedding CES questions within existing loyalty program workflows. Offer points or sweepstakes entries to increase participation rates.
– Always Close Feedback Loops
If a customer takes time to elaborate on a poor experience, it‘s imperative you acknowledge it and take decisive action. Share back outcomes of investigations.
Following those guidelines helps position CES surveys as easy inspection points versus burdensome assessments. Keep it simple yet strategic.
Continually Improving Your Customer Effort Score
While this guide outlines initial steps you can take to measure and improve Customer Effort Score, optimizing it long-term takes perseverance and processes. Some best practices include:
– Review CES Metrics at Least Monthly
Routinely comb through dashboards, slice data by various cuts and analyze trends. Report out insights to leadership and frontline teams.
– Set Improvement Goals
If your CES is presently 4.2, set a target to reach 4.6 in 6 months. Share targets to align staff to common objectives.
– Perform Quarterly Root Cause Analyses
Every 90 days examine what interactions or processes still pose high-effort. Brainstorm innovative ways to simplify those.
– Continually Gather Outside-In Perspectives
Through win/loss analysis and focus groups, keep tabs on how remaining pain points affect segments differently. Use insights to guide ongoing experience optimization.
– Automate Trigger-Based Workflows
Set up alerts for if % of customers rating an interaction difficult trends up by 15% WoW. Configure notifications to act quickly and decisively.
Driving enhancements across the board requires embedding Voice of Customer processes and continuous improvement rhythms across groups. But incrementally tackling pain points transforms customer perceptions over time.
The Bottom Line
At the end of the day Customer Effort Score represents the total burdens and barriers your customers face engaging with you. It directly affects loyalty and recommendations. By measuring CES then relentlessly chipping away at obstacles, you make it easier for customers to buy, use services, get support and solve problems.
While simple in concept, reducing customer effort necessitates formidable cultural commitment. It requires rallying staff across the organization around shared goals to minimize what customers have to do – not just once but daily and continuously over time.
The payoff of lower customer effort comes in the form of happier, more loyal customers who buy more and refer others. Plus you‘ll see tangible benefits through performance metrics like lower service contacts, fewer returns and swifter issue resolution.
So adopt CES as your true north metric for customer experience success. Let it guide investments and process changes. Transform teams into effort-focused machines seeking to simplify every interaction. Customers will reward your brand by picking the easier path versus navigating to competitors. And you‘ll grow revenue in the process.
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