There are various ways to understand how customers feel about your business, most of them coming down to delivering a simple survey.
Within the survey approaches, you may develop a variety of sorts, such as a general feedback survey or a Net Promoter Score survey. Each focuses on a different part of your customers’ experiences, yet they all try to comprehend their feelings.
What is a customer effort score (CES)?
A service statistic called the Customer Effort Score (CES) measures customers’ efforts to connect with your organization. These encounters might involve how difficult it is for them to utilize your product or service or how simple it is to address a problem with your customer care representatives.
If consumers need to browse several knowledge-based articles to get the one they need, they will spend a lot of work. Still, they will spend less effort if they can phone a service representative and have their refund completed immediately.
There is ample proof that a particular experience’s simplicity is sometimes a more significant predictor of client loyalty than merely gauging consumer happiness. Additionally, customer loyalty is an absolute cornerstone of successful companies in an increasingly competitive market.
Because of this, CES is well-liked by customer success teams. You ask the buyer to rate the convenience of their experience rather than how delighted they are.
With the publication of an HBR article titled Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers in 2010, the Customer Effort Score gained prominence. The essay is instructive—if not for the high caliber and breadth of the study, then at least for the surprising conclusion: The most straightforward approach to developing customer loyalty is not impressing your consumers but making it simpler for them to accomplish their goals.
When to use customer effort score
Knowing when to utilize CES surveys is crucial since it may hugely influence success to know how much effort customers make to engage with your company.
Following a transaction or subscription-related contact
A smart approach to get information on how much a client puts into completing their purchase is to send them a CES survey after they have engaged with your company and ultimately made a purchase.
They will have just completed an action, so the details you requested are still fresh in their minds. For instance, set it up so that, as clients reach the page confirming that their transaction has been processed, a poll cleverly asks them about their overall experience.
CES is often assessed by sending consumers an automated post-interaction survey asking them to score a specific statement on a set scale, depending on the interaction they just finished.
Also Read: Beyond NPS: Why Customer Feedback Needs a 360-Degree Revolution
Immediately after your customer service team or any other service-related encounter is finished
Sending surveys at any regular frequency makes little sense because CES surveys expressly ask consumers to assess the amount of effort they put into alleviating a pain issue.
Instead, businesses will send them immediately following a customer care interaction, such as after an email support case is handled or after a service-related experience, like reading a knowledge base article, to see how successful it was in fixing the issue.
Customers who have to call your company for troubleshooting should instantly receive CES questionnaires when their problem has been fixed. This will determine how hard they tried to contact you for a solution.
To supplement product teams’ UI and UX testing
The overlap between product and customer success teams’ use of the Customer Effort Score (CES) is intriguing. Product teams are starting to utilize CES to obtain feedback on how effectively the UI supports new feature uptake and pinpoint instances where consumers feel confused and lost.
There are two ways to present your CES surveys.
Likert Scale
A Likert Scale is a numerical rating scale with five to seven points corresponding to pertinent terms like “very tough” or “extremely easy.” Higher numbers indicate greater work, whereas lower numbers indicate relatively easy/low effort.
The survey’s instructions for Likert Scale questions that occasionally contain numbers inform customers of the possible range of answers.
Emoticon Ratings
Although emoticon ratings are less common than Likert Scales, they are nonetheless useful indicators for consumers since they allow them to connect effort level to cheerful or sad expressions.
Regardless of your approach, it’s crucial to remember that the questions you use should be unique to the aspect of the organization you’re trying to examine. The query should be focused on that contact, for instance, if you want to know how much work goes into opening a customer support ticket.
Customers can also be asked open-ended questions after giving their first response to help them understand why they gave a particular score.
You should know your average score after a sizable number of survey replies. Let’s discuss how you can determine your CES score.
Customer Effort Score Calculation
Your customer effort score is determined by multiplying the total number of survey replies by the sum of all customer effort ratings. The outcome will show you the typical level of effort clients make while dealing with your company.
Customer Effort Score = (sum of customer effort ratings/ Total number of survey responses)
The procedure is slightly different if you’re utilizing emoticons. For your internal analysis, you should give each emoticon a unique number. For instance, you may connect three to a sad face and one to a happy face. The greater figure represents the average amount of effort made by your consumers. You would next compute the average number of persons who chose each face.
Also Read: Building Lasting Customer Relationships in the Humanized Age of CX
What is a good customer effort score?
There is no unambiguous industry standard for customer effort scores. Nevertheless, based on how you set up your survey scales, average effort ratings that tilt more in one of the two directions show where your company is in terms of customer experience.
If your scale, for instance, rates one as low work and seven as substantial effort, a score of three indicates that consumers aren’t facing any major obstacles. Six, on the other hand, signifies frequent customer difficulty.
Your CES provides important data for analyzing usability and overall experience. Despite your best efforts, however, it does not tell you how pleased your consumers are with your company. Before launching your first CES survey, you should be familiar with all of the benefits and restrictions of this statistic.
A Customer Effort Score provides a robust measure because it lets you know how simple it is for consumers to connect with your company. This is probably your desired aim since you want to simplify their lives.
There is no customer feedback survey whose responses give you all the necessary information. Choose the best option after determining what is appropriate for your company and the information you need.
