CES: Customer Effort Score. What is it and what is it for?

Wondering what's the new term that everyone seems to be throwing around these days? Don't worry, we've got you covered! Here, you will find everything you need to know about Customer Effort Score, or CES, as everyone fondly calls it.

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Customer Effort Score is one of the most popular customer satisfaction survey methodologies used to measure how satisfied your customers are with your products/services and offers. What does the Customer Effort Score measure? It measures the ease of experience for a customer with a company.

A typical CES survey would look like this:

How easy was the experience of working with brand X?

Very difficult | Difficult | Neutral | Easy | Very easy

We already have CSAT and NPS. What's new at CES?

There are two other main metrics used to measure customer satisfaction: Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS). In CSAT surveys, a customer has to express their satisfaction with a score of 1-5. NPS, which was introduced in 2003, focuses on measuring customer loyalty and a customer's long-term happiness with the brand. NPS is considered to be a better metric than CSAT as it predicts customer behavior.

<<< Customer loyalty metrics: NPS, CES or CSAT >>>

However, the Customer Effort Score (CES) takes a slightly different approach in that it asks the effort a customer had to make to interact with the brand.

"CES is 1.8 times more predictive of customer loyalty than measures of customer satisfaction (CSAT), plus it is twice as predictive of Net Promoter Score (NPS)."-Gartner

With Customer Effort Score, the customer will choose any of the above options based on their experience with the company. Although many articles and magazines may tell you that you need to exceed your customers' expectations to keep them satisfied, all you need to do initially is make their experience as seamless as possible. Little things matter, something as simple as responding immediately to a query will keep you in good standing with the average customer.

How is the Customer Effort Score calculated?

These surveys are taken after a short customer interaction with the brand. The survey is usually a simple statement that is asked as a question. The question (read the survey) is usually followed by options ranging from 'Strongly agree' to 'Strongly disagree' with variations in between. There are also simple "Yes/No" questions on a CES survey. Companies measure CES while discovering other customer success metrics like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and other metrics that help measure the level of customer satisfaction.

How to conduct CES to measure your customers' effort levels

The Customer Effort Score is an indicator of customer effort and loyalty. It says that customers are loyal when their experience is smooth, and there's not much to lose if you can't exceed customer expectations, but you stand to lose a lot when you let them down.

Below, you'll find the four steps to conduct the CES:

1. Use the right words

CEB used a combination of different potential Customer Effort Score questions to nearly 50,000 customers from different verticals and geographies. There was a single-word combination that best predicted customer loyalty by 25%. The question was the following:

"To what extent do you agree with the following statement: The company made it easy for me to handle my problem."

The original CES question asked at its inception was this: "How much effort did you personally have to expend to handle your request?"

This is how a good Customer Effort Score question should be phrased:

• It must be in Likert format. Easy to ask and conceive.
• The question should be asked in a simple format that does not use jargon.
• The question is expected to be neutral.
• It could be a single point of experience or the overall experience.
• It can be extrapolated and used as a standard to compare with other metrics.

2. Ask questions at the right time

The perfect time for you to ask a CES question is when your customer has just interacted with the company. Once the question is raised immediately, there is a good chance that you will get an unbiased answer because the memory of the experience is fresh. Asking the CES question after a day or two doesn't do you any good.

You can ask a CES question at different points of interaction, including when the customer ends with a live chat on your website, when they are about to leave your website, after an email or phone interaction, etc. There are many tools with which you can ask CES questions.

3. Choose the scale value

The first question used as part of the CES had a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 meant good and 5 meant bad. There was a flaw in that reasoning because people associate a higher score with a favorable outcome. CES 2.0 came up with a 7-point scale whose options ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).

The best part about a 7-point scale is that it allows for more options than the arbitrary 5-point scale.

Customer effort score results analysis

CEB says that customers' loyalty increases by 22% if they can move it from 1 to 5 on a 7-point scale, while there is only a 2% increase if they manage to improve it to 7 out of 5. Following up with a customer is always a sure way to improve the relationship.

The next step is for you to work on improving the CES by analyzing the results. Get in touch with the customer through a call or send them an email to make things right.

What's so special about the Customer Effort Score?

This metric has been widely used and is only increasing in importance while some other metrics are slowly being pushed aside. While a metric like NPS only asks the customer how likely they are to recommend the brand to their friends and family, CES asks if they had to go to great lengths to deal with the brand. There are no misrepresentations that can occur as the question posed is extremely simple and easy to understand and answer.

The Customer Effort Score is getting attention as the point is to find out how much effort a customer requires when dealing with a brand. The less effort a customer has, the better it is for your brand. Things like web usability, user experience, and navigability are focused on improving the customer experience.

Nowadays, when there are cases of great digital transformations happening with all kinds of companies for multiple processes, it, unfortunately, happens that the customer experience and proper customer service are not taken care of at all.

What is considered a good Customer Effort Score?

All said and done, what's a good CES? There can be no arbitrary reliable number that you can use as a benchmark for the CES score. CES score less than 5 can be interpreted as a poor score and should be used as an opportunity to provide a better customer experience.

Advantages of using the Customer Effort Score

• CEB says that the Customer Effort Score outperforms NPS and CSAT in predicting a customer's future spending behavior.
• CES also highlights who will switch to a competitor.
• It allows you to uncover weaknesses at every customer touchpoint.
• It helps predict loyalty and you can also see if the customer will buy something from you again. It is much less volatile than the other metrics that are used.
• The CES model can be used at any time during the customer lifecycle (or read the sales lifecycle). Therefore, it is easy for you to take corrective action at regular intervals.
• This model lays the foundation for eliminating customer problems and helps build loyalty and trust.
• High effort equals low customer loyalty and CES helps you take care of this.
• Use CES as KPIs in your business to measure metrics like customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and to empower employees.
• Make a graph of each customer interaction where you find the CES score, see if there are areas where the experience can be improved, and monitor the CES score for each of these interactions.
• The fact that it is a short survey helps you get more responses.

Disadvantages of using CES as a metric

• You can't help it identify the difficulties customers face.
• Factors such as cost, product quality, service level, and competitors are not taken into account. These factors are completely ignored, which can lead to a different score than it should have been in the first place.
• CES doesn't give you insight into the customer's overall relationship with the company, it just shows you what's working on a transactional level.
• It does not allow you to segment the results according to the type of client.
• You can only address the obstacles a customer faces, but you don't say how or why a problem is caused.

Conclusion

Customer Effort Score has attracted a lot of attention over time, and rightfully so, it has a lot of potential for understanding customer experience. It helps add a lot of value to a Customer Experience Measurement Program that will help consumers. Organizations must decide on how they can continue to use a CES score and how to fix it.

While CES is a framework that helps and understands the effort a customer puts into doing business with you, it also has a slight drawback in that it only addresses one part of the customer experience. It does not take into account factors such as product price, quality, and other factors.

Simply finding out about CES doesn't translate into good trading values and actions. Being satisfied with the number will not keep your customers satisfied. You should look at patterns and survey responses to come to an informed conclusion.