Customers expect all interactions with your product to be easy and frictionless, with predictable outcomes. The customer effort score measures this experience.
Customer effort score (CES) is a tool to measure how much effort your customers have to put in when using your product or service. The customer Effort Score is a measure of the effort or time it takes to complete a task or transaction.
Measuring and optimizing the customer effort score has become an important part of customer service strategy.
By identifying where your customers experience high effort during their interactions with your product/service, you can make improvements that will decrease their frustration level and build trust in your brand.
CES metric can be used by companies to improve their products/services and build better customer relationships. It can also be used for pricing strategies, product design, development, or market research purposes.
A high customer effort score means that your product or service is very simple to use and that it makes it easy for customers to complete their tasks. On the other hand, a low CES could indicate that your customers find it difficult to communicate with your product and customer care, which could result in high customer churn rates.
Organizations may identify customer problems and quickly and effectively resolve pain points by measuring customer effort scores over time.
When should you use CES?
Although you can send out a CES survey every three months to get an average customer effort score for your product or service.
Typically, the following situations call for sending a CES survey:
1. After the purchase
Send a CES survey right away after a customer makes a purchase on your website to find out how simple or difficult the transaction was for them.
2. After signing up for a subscription
After a customer signs up for a subscription service, send them a CES survey to find out whether they are finding your products/services simple to use.
3. After having a customer service
CES is especially helpful for evaluating how well your customer service is performing. Customers who have negative or ineffective customer service experiences are more likely to shop elsewhere. You can learn if a customer had a challenging service phone call or chat by following up right away after an engagement.
By completing a survey and asking customers to rate the simplicity of their experience, the customer effort score is calculated. The method you choose to calculate CES ( Customer Effort Score ) will determine the results. Before using methods to measure customer effort scores, let's talk about the different types of CES surveys metrics first:-
An ordinal scale used to measure customer satisfaction is the Likert scale. The Likert scale option ranges from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree which enables the survey creator to gather a thorough picture of respondents' viewpoints.
It involves a customer numerical rating, which makes it simple to convert your raw data into a CES score. Respondents are required to rate their customer effort score questions on a scale from 1 to 10.
This is simple to understand and just takes a few seconds to respond to the survey. Ask users to answer with the emoticon that best reflects their feedback by asking them to rate “How simple it was to use your service” or by saying something like, “[Brand] made it easy to fix the issue”.
Calculating the Customer Effort Score is simple. Your Customer Effort Score is the total sum you receive in the responses divided by the number of responses.
You can measure CES by using this formula:-
CES = Total sum of responses scores / Number of responses
For example, Your survey includes a number scale, that ranges from 1 to 5, with 1 denoting Highly Dissatisfied and 5 denoting Highly Satisfied, and you get the results from 6 respondents, which are as follows:
4,3,2,4,3,1
So, the customer effort score will be:-
CES = 4+3+2+4+3+1 / 6 = 2.83
CES is an important metric for improving customer experience. The following are some advantages of CES score measurement:-
If you are looking to measure and optimize personalized customer experiences, then Dropthought can certainly help!
Dropthought is a user-friendly, omnichannel, and real-time customer experience management platform. We empower companies in different verticals to create delightful experiences for customers across their journey. Get detailed analysis and insights from data to exactly know what your customers think and what actions you need to take to delight them.
With a dedicated customer success team, we would ensure that you are optimizing your Customer Experience programs and strategies to create great experiences!
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