Calculate your Customer Effort Score

How much effort your customer puts?

What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is the measure of effort customers have to put into a certain interaction for any product and services with the company. The survey asks only one question that used to be asked in surveys are like “Did the company make it easy for you or how the interaction was to handle your issue?”. It can be modified as per the type of product and services of the company. Customers need to choose one of the options like “Strongly Disagree”, “Neutral” and “Strongly Agree” and to measure the score, all the answers are counted and the average of all will give the customer effort score.

CES Formula:

Key terms:

The results from the survey classify customers into 3 segments:

Easy: Such consumers are glad about the product as they have to put least effort in order to use and understand the product. They rate between 4-5.

Neutral: They are consumers, who neither finds it easy nor difficult while using any product. They rate 3 out of 5.

Difficult: Such consumers are not glad about the product as they put high efforts in order to use and understand the product. They rate between 1-2.

In case the score is low means that your customers are putting too much effort to interact with your business. The results are the indicators of your customers’ effortlessness for seeking any product or services. Thus it outperforms the other score like CSAT and NPS and has better predictive power. CES is a powerful measure due to its ability to capture customer effortlessness and impression at the transactional level and negative experiences as well. Reducing customer effort improves their impression of the brand, makes life easier for customers and thus their overall customer experience. Authors of the Forbes-published article, “Reducing Customer Effort Is Your Best Investment” argue their statement: “Today’s customers are busy and don’t want to have to jump through hoops to get the help they need, especially if a product breaks or they have issues with service.”

Benefits of CES:

CES is a great way for looking at specific customer touch points and specific processes to find out how much effort it took about resolving their issue and how much time they spent to find a way to address it. The CES enables you to identify common follow-up questions that can be asked frequently from the customer by service teams in order to lower customer service representatives' case reopen rates and callback rates. Customer effort score can be implemented for both customer success teams and product teams because both depend on the ease of use.

CES Survey in SaaS:

A CES survey is conducted to support interaction. But in SaaS businesses, the CES survey can help to gage the customer's efforts. The feedback from the CES survey can help to make it right. According to the Harvard Business Review, CES can predict repurchasing even better than CSAT, making it a critical metric for SaaS companies that rely heavily on successful on-boarding and customer success to lay the foundation for repeat purchases. Bad CES can negatively impact your business' long-term success by losing customer loyalty. If your customers do not have an easy experience interacting with your brand, do not receive a quick solution to their concerns, or are unlikely to recommend your product or service, this means that your business does not have a compelling experience. According to NewVoiceMedia, US businesses lose $62 billion each year due to bad customer experience. Considering the nature of online interactions in an increasingly digital world, customers have the ability to spread their opinions, both negative and positive, so it is absolutely essential for you to make your customers share something positive and delightful.

Using a business dashboard for your customer service management practices with well-defined, well-organized visuals, your business is capable of evaluating a wide range of customer experience metrics and KPIs.

Conclusion:

CES & CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) are transactional metrics that help to analyze key touch points in the customer's journey. CSAT measures overall satisfaction with a number of attributes so that you can refine those that are most meaningful to your customers. Whereas Net Promoter Score provides a broad picture of long-term relationship and customer loyalty. Satisfaction will also depend on the quality of the product and service. What is quality, exactly? We can say that the seller has delivered quality whenever his product or service meets or exceeds the expectations of the customer.

Consequently , the quality of any product or service directly affects the CES of any company that is incredibly useful for the smoothing of the customer's path. Although the result of improved CES can help companies gain strong customer loyalty, increased consumer capabilities pose challenges. Technology plays an increasing role in many companies and industries, offering new ways to meet customer needs, and building relationships and loyalty. When marketers do all this, they make substantial contributions to overall quality management and customer satisfaction as well as to the profitability of the company.