Why Customer Effort Score is Essential for Your Business

When you are navigating the world of customer experience, one metric stands out for its clarity and impact: the Customer Effort Score (CES). This article is your guide to understanding CES and using it to drive business growth. With CES, simplifying your customer journey isn't just a goal – it's a measurable outcome.

The Value of Customer Feedback

Before we dive into the Customer Effort Score, it’s important to emphasize one thing: The value of customer feedback. Listening to your customers is the first step in delivering an exceptional customer experience. And in that sense, customer relation surveys are a goldmine of insight.

Customer relation surveys are more than satisfaction checks; they're your tool for truly understanding your customers’ needs and wants. Through these surveys, you can identify how to make your service smoother and where you may be missing the mark.

Encouraging detailed feedback through open comment sections and follow-up questions allows you to see your business from your customers' perspective, while advanced text analytics tools can even analyze and cluster these responses, pinpointing exactly where your business needs to focus its efforts.

Learn more about the role of text analysis in customer experience.

What is a Customer Effort Score?

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the ease with which customers can interact with your company. A high CES indicates that customers find it easy to get what they need from your company and serves as a benchmark for exceptional customer service.

This metric gives you invaluable insight into how customer-friendly your processes are and whether any of the touchpoints in your customer journey could be optimized.

What is a good Customer Effort Score?

Defining a Customer Effort Score benchmark is challenging, as there is no one-size-fits-all rule that applies universally across industries. In addition, survey providers use different measurement scales, such as 1 to 5, 1 to 7, or 1 to 10.

However, as a general guideline, a good CES is considered to be a 4 or higher on a 1 to 5 scale, a 6 or higher on a 1 to 7 scale, and an 8 or higher on a 1 to 10 scale. These numbers can serve as a simple guide for businesses to gauge customer satisfaction.

NPS vs. CES: What's the difference?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) are two of the most commonly used metrics when companies evaluate their customer experience. Both metrics provide significant insights, but from different perspectives:

While the Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty through their likelihood to recommend your company, CES focuses on how easy it is for customers to interact with your company. While both metrics are vital, CES specifically sheds light on the smoothness of the customer journey and provides targeted insights for improvement.

Get more tips for working on your customer journey.

Consequences of a Low Customer Effort Score

A low CES indicates complex processes that could be streamlined and highlights areas in the customer journey that may be causing unnecessary frustration. Here are just a few examples of touchpoints that can contribute to a low Customer Effort Score:

• A cumbersome return process
• Confusing website navigation
• Long wait times for customer support
  
  

Such inefficiencies often result in higher cost-to-serve, as more resources are required to support customers, whether due to unanswered questions or unresolved frustrations.

In addition, unoptimized processes like these not only drain your resources but can also damage your brand's reputation. Customers today share their experiences widely, and a few negative stories can turn off potential new customers.

Read more about how you make customer experience easy.

The Benefits of Optimizing Your Customer Effort Processes

There are many organizational benefits to focusing on optimizing customer effort processes. One of the most compelling is the potential for cost reduction. Intelligent improvements based on customer feedback in key processes can reduce the cost to serve by 20-40%.

By prioritizing and acting on insights gained from customer interactions, you can achieve the dual benefit of increasing customer satisfaction while reducing operational costs. This synergy between customer-centric improvements and cost efficiencies illustrates why optimizing customer efforts is a strategic imperative for growth and sustainability.

In addition, simplifying and optimizing customer interactions not only reduces costs but can also increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, turning customers into brand ambassadors.

Discover why ambassadors are important to your business.

Simple Actions to Improve Your Customer Effort Score

Improving your Customer Effort Score is essential to fostering loyalty and increasing customer satisfaction. By focusing on reducing friction and making interactions effortless, you can create a more seamless customer journey that drives repeat business and positive word-of-mouth.

Here are 6 different areas and concrete actions you can take to increase your Customer Effort Score:

Streamline communication:

• Use clear, concise language at all customer touch points. Avoid jargon and focus on customer-friendly phrasing.

• Implement FAQs and chatbots that quickly resolve common questions, and ensure they are regularly updated based on customer feedback.
  
  

Proactively identify and resolve issues:

• Set up automated alerts for delays or system outages so your team can proactively notify customers before they experience problems.

• Create a "priority resolver" team to monitor common service bottlenecks and take immediate action when certain thresholds are triggered, such as extended wait times or multiple failed transactions.
  
  

Empower your frontline staff:

• Develop a "resolution matrix" that gives employees clear guidance on what actions they can take independently, such as issuing refunds, offering discounts, or upgrading services without manager approval.

• Use role-playing scenarios during training to help agents practice effectively and empathetically handling specific customer frustrations.
  
  

Simplify processes:

• Audit your systems to identify and eliminate cumbersome processes, such as lengthy forms or redundant service resolution steps.

• Provide intuitive self-service options for customers to manage their own needs, such as one-click re-order buttons or easy-to-navigate returns portals.
  
  

Provide multiple communication channels:

• Ensure that customers can contact you through their preferred methods, such as email, phone, live chat, or social media.

• Maintain consistency across these channels to avoid conflicting information.
  
  

Measure and Adjust Regularly:

• Continuously track CES results and act on customer insights. Use tools such as touchpoint-specific surveys to refine specific areas of concern.

• By implementing these simple yet powerful steps, companies can not only improve CES, but also build lasting customer loyalty and improve operational efficiency.

Need Help Getting the Most out of Your Customer Feedback?

Our customer relation survey tool is designed to help you take a deep dive into your Customer Effort Score (among other metrics) and determine how to improve your ROI by making your business processes more efficient.

With our advanced text and sentiment analysis, we can help you identify patterns and areas for improvement to ensure your company not only meets but exceeds customer expectations.

After the survey, our team of experts is on hand to transform your survey data into actionable insights and implement lasting positive changes in your customer experience.

Explore our Customer Experience-solution here.