How to Measure and Improve Customer Effort Score

With competitors appearing everywhere, having a competitive edge is vital for your business to survive. Improving your customer effort score could help you gain it.

Customer experience determines your business’ success. One way to assess how your customers perceive your brand is by determining your customer effort score (CES). The CES measures how easy or difficult it is for customers to interact with your company, whether resolving an issue, purchasing, or seeking assistance.

Understanding customer effort score

The CES is a metric that gauges the ease or difficulty of a customer’s experience with a company. It’s typically calculated by asking customers how much effort they put into resolving an issue or completing a task.

The CES scale usually ranges from 1-5 or 1-7. A high CES score suggests that customers found it easy to interact with the company, while a low score points to challenges and difficulties faced by the customers. Understanding how much effort your customers put in can help you identify pain points and areas for improvement, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Why does the customer effort score (CES) matter?

Measuring the customer effort score will help you determine the customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and future behavior. Traditionally, brands and companies use straightforward surveys to assess customer satisfaction scores. However, while helpful, those surveys do not give the bigger picture or the whole context of the customer’s experience.

Customer effort scores allow companies to develop the critical factor of “ease of use.” In other words, they consider how much effort the customer exerts during interactions.

A good customer effort score is a faster way to win customer loyalty than providing extra frills or “wow-worthy” customer experiences.

Measuring customer effort

Measuring customer effort is essential for gaining insights into the customer experience. CES surveys are valuable for this purpose, allowing you to measure customer effort at various touchpoints.

These surveys can be automatically sent after a customer completes a purchase, signs up for a subscription, or interacts with the customer service team. By collecting this data, you can pinpoint where customers are facing difficulties and take steps to make their interactions smoother and more efficient.

When to measure customer effort

Timing is critical when it comes to measuring customer effort. Sending CES surveys at the right moments is important to get accurate and actionable feedback. Here are some best practices on when to measure customer effort:

• Immediately after purchase: Send a CES survey directly after a customer has purchased on your website to understand how easy or convoluted the purchasing process was for them.

• Immediately after a subscription sign-up: During onboarding, send a CES survey after a customer has signed up for a subscription service to gauge whether they find your services easy to use.

• Immediately after a customer service touchpoint: CES is beneficial for evaluating the effectiveness of your customer service. Customers with frustrating or unhelpful customer service interactions will likely take their business elsewhere, so measuring their effort right after these interactions is crucial.

By measuring customer effort at these critical moments, you can gather valuable insights and make informed decisions to improve the overall customer experience.

How to measure the customer effort score

Companies measure customer effort scores by obtaining customer ratings on how easy they found it to communicate with a company. Typically, this occurs after a specific interaction, such as answering a customer service question or purchasing a product.

Additionally, it’s important to remember that if you want to calculate customer effort score, companies should measure it right when a client finishes a significant operation of your company.

For example, you can ask for feedback after:

• A customer completes a purchase.

• A support ticket is resolved.

• A live chat session ends.

• An issue is addressed via email.

Collecting answers in real time guarantees you get the customer’s honest and immediate impressions, providing practical clues on how your company can improve customer effort. 

Types of CES surveys

You can use different types of surveys to collect CES data, depending on the kind of feedback you’re looking for. Here are the most common surveys that you can use to measure customer effort scores.

Calculating and interpreting results

Customer effort score calculation

After creating and sending out the customer effort score survey, it’s essential to collect the survey data and calculate and interpret the results using this formula:

What is a good customer effort score?

Although evaluating and measuring each customer effort score survey has become a standard method in the industry, there is yet to be a universally accepted score since various industries and businesses require different amounts of customer effort.

The rule of thumb is that a customer effort score needs to be 5 to 6 on a 7-point scale. 

However, in general:

• A high CES score indicates that customers find your processes easy.

• A low CES score suggests that customers encounter significant challenges in their interactions.

For example, companies like Amazon or Apple are often lauded for their seamless experiences. At the same time, businesses with complex user interfaces that may support systems may score lower.

Analyzing results

Once you have your CES data, the next step is to evaluate the data and determine the areas where customers exerted more customer effort and address such issues immediately.

1. Look for patterns

Looking for patterns will help the areas of your brand or business where customers exert more effort. Suppose the evaluation reveals a department or team that receives low CES scores repeatedly, like a customer care team, billing department, or technical support. In that case, it may be time to review the process and provide strategies to help address these problems. 

2. Segment your results

Aside from looking at patterns, breaking down the results could help you solve each problem. So, break down your CES by customer demographics, product type, or interaction type. You can create a direct marketing plan by segmenting your results and improving overall customer satisfaction.

3. Compare with industry benchmarks

While no business is complete, it’s also a good idea to compare your company or brand to industry benchmarks to get a broader perspective. Comparing your company will help you understand your brand better and determine how your business stands out compared to other companies in the same market. 

Improving customer experience and fostering customer loyalty

A low customer effort score is not the end of the world — it’s an opportunity to improve. By identifying common problems among customers, addressing those problems, and making interactions more accessible, you can raise your customer effort score, increase customer satisfaction, and foster loyalty.

Strategies for improvement

Improving your CES requires a proactive approach to making interactions with your business as effortless as possible. Streamlining processes, enhancing customer service, and providing self-service options can significantly limit customer effort and create a more satisfying experience. Below are some practical strategies to help improve your CES and boost customer loyalty.

1. Simplify your processes

Look for opportunities to eliminate unnecessary steps from customer interactions. Can you simplify the purchase procedure? Are there any extra steps you can throw out of your support process? Simple processes increase CES and make the overall experience more accessible for all customers.

2. Enhance customer service

Responsive and knowledgeable customer support agents can significantly minimize customer effort. Training your employees to address every problem they might encounter quickly is essential.

3. Optimize your user interface

No customer likes spending hours inquiring about a service or a product. As such, one way to improve customer experience is to provide a user-friendly interface so that customers of any demographic can easily navigate your official website.

4. Practice proactive communication

Communicate with customers about common issues, upcoming changes, or possible delays before they happen. This way, people will spend less effort reaching out for updates from you as a company.

5. Invest in self-service options

One common practice that many benchmark companies provide is self-service options so that customers can quickly solve the problem themselves and won’t have to make an effort to contact you.

Provide resources such as FAQs, knowledge bases, instructional videos, and chatbots, allowing customers to resolve issues without contacting support.

Simplifying processes

After all, why would customers choose an overcomplicated process when a similar product or service offers the same goods or services but with a simple and streamlined process? Simplifying the processes will decrease customer effort and improve overall customer experience. 

1. Streamline customer interactions: Reducing the number of individual customer interactions on the customer journey is another way to simplify processes. For example, you can limit the time it takes to connect with customer support when customers have a problem or alter the process for arranging services. 

2. Simplify website navigation: A well-ordered website will minimize customer effort. So, ensuring your customer can easily find all your product/service pages, FAQ or post questions, and contact info is essential. 

3. Make information more accessible: It’s essential to prioritize giving straightforward and easy-to-find information using FAQs, tutorials, descriptions, etc., to make it far easier for customers to continue and finish interactions with your organization.

Enhancing customer service

Customer service is a crucial driver of your customer effort score. The more proactive your customer support team is, the less effort your customers must put into resolving their issues. Here is how to improve customer service to reduce how much effort your customer exerts: 

1. Provide quick customer service

Time is gold, no matter which industry you belong to. As such, one common source of frustration that customer support often deals with is how to provide quick customer service. You can resolve this by ensuring your team is well-trained, responsive, and capable of assisting quickly.

Another way to accomplish this could be by implementing a chatbot or automated response through AI to alleviate common questions so the customers and agents save time.

2. Review interactions regularly.

By regularly reviewing customer service interactions as a team, you can quickly identify opportunities to decrease customer effort. You can identify opportunities where customer effort can be reduced by routinely reviewing customer service interactions as a team.

For example, suppose your customers regularly call in about a single issue. In that case, it may indicate that some information or product is problematic to find or that a process is too complex to follow. You can develop a better method to address each customer’s concern from here. 

3. Offer omnichannel support

Customers should be able to reach your company through various communication modes, whether email, phone, live chat, or social media. By providing a single unified customer support platform, your team can resolve their issues faster without switching from one mode to another. 

Building a customer-centric team

A customer-centric approach means prioritizing the needs of your customers at every touchpoint.

• Training and development: When training your customer service team, your team must understand the value of customer support, customer effort scores, and how their goal is to reduce customer effort using their tools and knowledge. 

• AI-powered tools: Give your team easy access to AI-powered systems to automate repetitive tasks, such as routing tickets or suggesting solutions. It will allow agents to focus on more critical tasks, reducing the customer’s effort.

• Focus on solutions: Encourage your team to focus on solving the customer’s current issue instead of simply responding to them. Customer-centric teams should ensure that all matters brought to them by the customer are fully resolved before ending the communication.

Common mistakes to avoid

When giving out customer effort score surveys, it’s vital to avoid common mistakes that hinder the true intention of the CES survey, as it can prevent feedback collection from being great. You must avoid a few common errors for effective customer feedback.  

1. Over-surveying customers

Companies must refrain from distributing excessive surveys. Although providing customer surveys is a way to collect data, over-surveying can annoy customers and ruin their overall experience. 

• Don’t send CES surveys at regular intervals. A CES survey is unlike a Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey, which can be sent periodically. It works best when you want to know what customers think after specific events.

  For instance, emailing customers after each purchase can overwhelm them. In contrast, customers who receive monthly questionnaire emails will discard them unless they find them relevant, leading to low response rates and erroneous replies.

• Only send CES surveys after critical interactions. It’s essential to send a customer effort score survey only after a high-effort service interaction, such as after customer service calls, so that the feedback you get in return can be directly relevant to an action taken. 

2. Ignoring customer feedback

Collecting CES data is only the first step. However, how you use this data is just as important as it will determine whether you listen to your customers or not. 

• Continually monitor your CES. The CES is not a metric you set and forget. The only way to know whether it improves or not is through constant monitoring. By constantly analyzing CES data, companies can track trends, find out where customers are having trouble, and address those problems. 

• Act on the feedback to improve customer interactions. After getting feedback, it’s crucial to analyze and address every issue. So, if you notice that customers consistently talk about high effort in some areas, it may be time to change the process for that area and give it some extra care and attention. Failure to pay attention may cause more customer irritation, reducing the CES and eventually losing customers.

Summary

Customer effort score and continuously striving to improve it can dramatically affect your business.  

By understanding the level of effort customers often put into interacting with your company, you can quickly determine which areas must be addressed and provide solutions accordingly. Focusing on CES is not just about satisfying customers but also about creating ones who will keep returning.

The CES is among the most critical factors in customer loyalty and satisfaction. By implementing strategies that help minimize customer efforts, such as streamlining processes or investing in HelpDesk technology, you save yourself from making losses in the future.

Recognizing customer effort is critical to ensuring that each customer has a seamless experience with your company and thus secures customer loyalty.

By continuously gaining feedback, measuring your CES, and acting on identified problems, you can ensure that your business meets and exceeds customer expectations.