Understanding Customer Effort Score (CES)

Effort matters to customers. The less time and energy they need to spend on getting the results they want, the better. But how do you measure this and determine whether your customers are receiving a valuable and effective service with as little effort as possible?

If something requires too much effort, customers will often lose motivation and leave your site, which means you lose an edge in comparison to competitors. But by tracking and analysing your customer effort score, you can discover how much effort is needed from your customers and pinpoint areas where the customer journey can be improved. Here, we’ll be explaining the ins and outs of customer effort score as a key business metric, alongside how and why your customer service team should be using this to your advantage.

First, your team will need to determine which scores are classed as high and low. For example, if your questions state that 1 is an unsatisfactory response and 8 means the customer was highly satisfied, then you might class any response 5 or above as agreeing that the interaction was easy. Once this has been determined, you should be able to collect the two figures needed for this calculation which are the total number of customers who agree that their interaction was easy and the total number of survey responses.

As with any customer metric, there are advantages and disadvantages to CES. Below we’ll run through a few of each and the considerations you’ll need to make.

Pros:

•  The data is easy to action: Since customer surveys are mostly quantifiable, it’s easy to analyse, compare and action any changes that need to be made based on your CES.
• It offers insight into future customer behaviour: From purchasing habits to opinions on the customer journey, a good or bad customer effort score can offer some indication of how customer behaviour might change.
• A strong indicator of referral likelihood: If a customer responds to your surveys and indicates that their experience required less effort, they’re more likely to voice positive opinions to friends and family.

Cons:

• No insight into customer relationships with the business: CES offers more of a snapshot of the customer experience, which means that your team can’t link it with customer relations easily.
• Surveys must be sent immediately: Unless survey questions are sent immediately after the customer does something (e.g. completing a purchase), the response isn’t likely to be a true reflection of their experience since they might forget.
• Doesn’t measure the broad effort needed to interact with your business: CES only measures specific experiences rather than the customer journey across your entire site.

 A high customer effort score means that your business provides effortless experiences for customers, while a low CES means that people find your processes arduous and in need of improvement. One of the main reasons it’s important to measure this metric is because it shows where potential customer pain points are within the customer experience. When customers report that a task or interaction requires more effort, this allows your team to fix the specific issue. This experience could be contributing to low retention and loyalty rates, which can then be boosted by taking the appropriate action.

Your customer effort score should be worked out for as many processes and interactions as possible to give you the broadest view of how much effort is required from customers on your site. However, it’s crucial to avoid bombarding customers with surveys while navigating the website since this is more likely to harm their experience.

Instead, focus on significant areas such as checkout, product and service pages, alongside self-service customer service sections and interaction channels. This should give you a good indication of customer satisfaction in these areas without overwhelming the user with too many questions.

When setting up a CES survey, you’ll need to consider the best practices to follow, which questions to ask and how you’ll be analysing the responses. Below we’ll cover all of this to make sure your surveys can effectively capture the opinions and emotions of your customers and allow your team to boost the customer experience.

CES survey questions

As we’ve mentioned, questions should be asked after a customer completes an action. But the question itself doesn’t need to be the same for different actions. For example, you could simply ask what they’d rate their experience on a scale from 1-10, or you could ask them to explain what they thought of a process or interaction on your site.

Think about the value that the question responses would provide before implementing it into your site.

CES survey best practices

There are a few CES survey best practices to follow, including:

• Offering the opportunity for customers to leave open-ended feedback: This gives them more room to explain their experience and gives your business more to work with when deciding what needs to be improved or changed to boost the customer experience.
• Using a combination of different question responses depending on the action: For example, you could use a Likert scale or an emoticon rating for simple questions and allow open-ended responses where customers can provide more detail for complex processes or interactions.
• Implementing the survey straight after the interaction: The customer is likely to give a more realistic answer if they’re asked earlier.

CES survey example

Below are some example questions you could use in your CES survey, and what category of question type they fall under.

Open-ended questions

• Were you satisfied with your shopping experience today?
• Tell us about your shopping experience with us today.
• Why didn’t you choose to complete your purchase with us on this occasion?

Scale-based questions

• On a scale from 1 (low) to 10 (high), how would you rate your experience with our chatbot?
• On a scale from 1 (easy) to 4 (difficult), how easy was it to find the information you were looking for?
• On a scale from 1 (quickest) to 4 (slowest), how quickly did we resolve your issue?

Analysing CES survey responses

When analysing your survey responses, holding onto the context is important. Contextualise each piece of feedback using variables such as the interaction channel, location and which agent was responsible for the interaction. This will allow your team to filter the ratings and feedback based on the segmentation and use this to pinpoint areas for future improvement with context in mind. Once the responses have been analysed, your business must close the feedback loop by acting based on the ratings and any comments.

We hope that this blog has shed some light on what Customer Effort Score is, why it’s useful for businesses and how to create an effective CES survey that can help you improve the customer journey.