Detailed Guide to Customer Effort Score

Consider the customer experience! nonetheless, the simple type.

“Compared to 4% of customers who experienced high effort interactions, 94% of customers with low-effort interactions intended to repurchase.” Logically, the likelihood that a user will finish anything increases with decreased effort.

Continue reading to learn why it important and how to measure it to enhance your services and the experience of your clients.

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What Exactly is CES (Customer Effort Score)?

A customer experience statistic known as Customer Effort Score tracks how hard customers work to get their questions or problems handled. It records the interactions that clients have had with your services throughout their journey.

The ease of customer interaction is measured by Customer Effort Score. To identify the sources of friction and remove bottlenecks on the way to the ideal customer experience, ask clients how easy it was to receive the services they needed rather than how satisfied they are with it.

The CES survey includes a rating scale, sometimes known as a Likert scale, where respondents are asked to rate how straightforward it is to solve problems. Adding follow-up inquiries will allow you to gather information in greater detail.

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How Can Customer Effort Be Measured?

Customers’ contacts with your services, such as customer service or the technical department, are referred to as customer effort. It’s how many steps they need to take in order to finish the desired task. Anything is possible.

• After-sale services
• Contacting the support representative
• Locating the contact details on a website or app
• Resolving problems with customer service
• Chatting online to get their questions answered

In today’s competitive climate, high-effort transactions that demand more time and effort from customers are more prone to abandonment. Delivering a low-effort experience to your website visitors and clients is therefore necessary.

But how can the strength of a relationship be gauged?

You must map the customer journey to identify the touchpoints where they experience difficulty and then get in touch with your customer success team to measure the customer effort. Surveys can then be used to get Customer Effort Scores and other useful feedback information.

One of the most often used measures to gain quantitative and qualitative insights into customers’ efforts and enhance their experience is called CES, or Customer Effort Score.

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Customer Effort Score (CES) Surveys: Their Value

To reduce disloyalty, customers’ efforts must be reduced. Understanding consumers’ efforts and listening to their input on their pain points will help you provide a low-effort experience. Better conversions, retention, and brand loyalty result from this.

1. Offers Information Regarding Your Support Services

You learn more about how smooth your support services are thanks to Customer Effort Score. The data can be used to create new service points, improve current service channels, and eliminate procedures that are not necessary and obstruct providing exceptional customer care.

2. Encourages Customer Loyalty and Retention

Customer effort predicts customer loyalty 40% more accurately than customer satisfaction.

The consumer is more likely to return if they receive a low-effort service.

You may therefore retain more consumers by using Customer Effort Score as a progress indicator and enhancing it over time.

3. Lowers Service Expenses and Costs

Customers that require less effort to handle their concerns put less strain on your support personnel, which results in cheaper resource costs.

A simple experience may cut down on recurrent calls by 40%, saving time and resources for the service.

This score might steer you towards areas for development so you can offer a speedy answer because it is a clear reflection of the consumers’ troubles.

4. Encourages Good Word of Mouth

Companies that give clients a low effort experience have an NPS score that is 65 points higher than those that put out more effort.

Why does this matter?
Customers who have their problems quickly answered or who find it simple to use your product, website, etc. are more likely to recommend your brand or business to others. Positive feedback, word-of-mouth, product shares, and other factors are possible.

Therefore, a high CES score can boost your brand’s recognition and encourage damage management by reducing negative publicity about your goods and services.

Top 4 Benefits of Customer Effort Score (CES) Measuring

The following are some advantages of CES implementation in your company:

1. Makes the Customer Experience Qualify

Quantifying the quality of the customer experience is one of the main benefits of employing customer effort score questionnaires. The customer’s impression of the interaction can be captured in a single-digit number that encompasses the entire dialogue.

We are aware that it is unable to fully substitute the real feedback insights you can learn from free-text responses to your CES surveys. However, the CES score in numbers offers a place to start. You might prioritize the poor scores first to address the concerns of your clients.

2. Consolidated View on the Effectiveness of Support Services

Given the variety of touchpoints clients have available to them, keeping track of each one individually would be an enormous undertaking.

You’ve got an issue when you take into account the time required to review the comments and transcript of each chat call, email, and text.

Imagine being inundated with messages while unhappy clients quit your services in search of safer waters.

The CES survey is useful in this situation. You can use it to assess how well various touchpoints are working.

Using information from various touchpoints, you can develop benchmarks for your customer effort score (CES) and then compare them.

The ability to view the service experience as a whole or divide it into several channels to gain more in-depth information is provided.

3. Lessen the Points of Friction

You may identify the areas where consumers are having the most difficulty using the response information from your customer effort score questions. After that, incorporate these insights into your optimization plan to improve the customer service.

Simple problems like lengthy wait times can be fixed by adding more customer service representatives or self-help tools.

Or there might be a significant problem with TATs or support quality.

Such surveys can direct you toward whatever it is so you can design a simple experience.

Types of Benchmarks Customer Effort Score (CES)

By benchmarking, you may determine where you stand in the contest of customer service. What sort of standards can you employ, though?

There are essentially three different CES benchmarking models to experiment with and tweak, namely:

1. Internal CES Benchmarking

The current customer effort scores are compared to historical trends using a self-hosted CES benchmarking system.

This criterion does not look for data from other industries or competitors because the data sets are made up of prior scores. Monitoring the evolution of the scores over time is useful.

2. Competitive CES Benchmarking

Such scores from a specific time period are compared to those of your immediate competitors in competitive benchmarking.

The system’s usefulness in real life?

conducting a comparative investigation to learn what comparable brands are doing to keep their exceptional CES score.

3. Industry Standard CES Benchmarking

Benchmarking against industry standards or global CES is the process of comparing your customer support operations to those in your sector.

If you were in charge of a hotel, for instance, you could be interested in learning how the largest hotel chains in the world handle their relationships with customers and how you can do the same or even better.

These CES reports are easily accessible from a variety of sources, or you can employ professionals to conduct the necessary research and assist you in developing a Global CES benchmark for your company.

Customer Effort Score (CES) Measuring: 5 CES Scale Types

Different scales can be utilized to gather various client data kinds when it comes to measuring CES. Typically, the respondents are asked to rate their amount of effort on a numbered scale or to indicate whether they agree or disagree with the statement using a Likert scale.

Depending on the level of measurement sensitivity you need from the consumer, each scale can vary.

For instance:

A 7-point Likert scale is more sensitive than a 5-point scale because it gives customers more ways to express the amount of effort they put into solving their problems.

1. Likert Scales for CES Surveys

The Likert scale metric uses a 5- or 7-point unidimensional answer scale to evaluate the respondents’ attitudes and actions. Response anchors are the names given to the responses, which range from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” or vice versa.

The replies gauge how strongly respondents agree or disagree with the stated opinion. The Likert scale can also evaluate other differences including frequency, priority, likelihood, quality, and relevance in addition to assertions of agreement.

5-point Likert scale

The respondents can select from 5 response anchors on a 5-point Likert scale. For clarity, the responses are often numbered from 1 to 5 and can be color-coded from red to green.

For instance:

• How happy or unhappy are you with the customer service agent we have?

Using a 7-point Likert Scale

The identical question can be used with a 7-point Likert scale that has 7 response anchors. Given that responders have more possibilities on the 7-point scale, it can provide deeper insights. However, giving respondents more options could make it harder for them to select an answer.

For instance:

• How happy or unhappy are you with the customer service agent we have?

2. Numbered Rating Scale

The respondents are asked to rate their experiences on a scale of 1–10 or 1–5, depending on the parameter. Lower scores imply high effort (very hard) or unfavorable experiences, while higher numbers typically reflect low effort (extremely easy) or positive experiences. Nevertheless, depending on the context of the phrase, the sentiment may equally be the opposite.

This scale can also be color-coded from red to green to help respondents understand it and correlate the colors with positive and negative experiences, respectively.

• 1–5 Rating Scale
• 1–10 Rating Scale

3. Emoticon Ratings

You may use the emoticons to conduct brief Customer Effort Score surveys on your website or app because they are relatively easy to grasp and need little to no effort to complete. On a linear scale from unhappy to joyful, it has smiley faces, with a neutral face in the middle.

6 Best Practices and Advice for Creating Effective CES Campaigns

1. Timing is Essential for Data Collection

When displaying the survey is crucial for boosting response rates and obtaining useful feedback.

For instance:

• Following their encounter with customer service, you can immediately show or submit the CES survey.
• After settling customers’ difficulties via contact or chat, request CES right away.
• Six to twenty four hours after the service request is finished, send an email survey to gather CES.

2. Select Your Touchpoints

The higher the response rate and the more information you can gather from the respondents, the more channels you select to use to distribute the CES survey. The CES surveys can be distributed by shareable links, SMS, and emails.

Including the Customer Effort Score survey on your website, app, or other product where you want to collect customer feedback is another option to get immediate feedback. In this method, once a visitor or customer satisfies the predetermined criteria, the survey will immediately appear for them.

3. Pick the Correct Scale

The outcome is completely dependent on selecting the right scale. Various scale types quantify consumer efforts with varying degrees of sensitivity.

A 7-point Likert scale, for instance, offers customers more alternatives for responses than a 5-point scale, allowing for a greater understanding of the customer’s effort.

Similar to this, the 1-10 rating scale has a different sensitivity than the 1-5 rating scale because it offers more options to the client.

Additionally, how you read the scale will depend on the order of the scale response anchors.

A higher score will be preferred if the reaction anchors cover a variety of emotions, from negative to positive.

For instance:

How simple or challenging was it to acquire assistance with your issue?

• Very difficult
• Difficult
• Neutral
• Easy
• Very easy

If the scale anchors are switched around, the greater the score, nevertheless.

For instance:

How simple or challenging was it to acquire assistance with your issue?

• Very easy
• Easy
• Neutral
• Difficult
• Very difficult

To accurately track development, it is advantageous to pick the appropriate scale and maintain its consistency.

4. Pose the Appropriate Queries

You’ll obtain more accurate responses if you ask the right questions. Make sure that you construct the questions in Customer Effort Score surveys in a way that accurately reflects the customers’ efforts to fix the issue, whether they found it difficult or simple to receive assistance.

Additionally, make an effort to speak in a neutral tone to prevent influencing the responders in a certain way. Posing it as a statement can help to avoid being taken as a leading question.

Last but not least, refrain from using the word “effort,” as it might have several meanings depending on the language. Instead, you may reword the inquiry to specifically inquire of the replies how simple it was to fix the problem.

For instance:

How simple or challenging is it to use our website?

• Very difficult
• Difficult
• Neutral
• Easy
• Very easy

For Instance:

How simple or challenging is it to use our website?

• Very difficult
• Difficult
• Neutral
• Easy
• Very easy

5. Include follow-up and open-ended Questions in the CES survey

Since the CES response anchors are broken down into three different sentiment categories—unhappy, neutral, and happy—it makes sense to include a follow-up question to elicit more detailed input. It will assist you in comprehending the problems and worries so you can address them quickly.

In order to tailor the survey to each responder, you can also use question branching to send them to a new set of questions based on their responses.

6. Monitor Your CES Results Over Time

Monitoring your CES score is essential for gauging your development over time. The CES score improving is concrete evidence that the modifications you made are effective. On the other hand, a declining CES score would enable you to identify and address consumer issues more rapidly.

Monitoring the Customer Effort Score will enable you to enhance the client experience while minimizing extra work.

The better it is, the higher end of the range.

Use consistent choices in order to obtain accurate outcomes and interpretations.

It should be emphasized once more that this number does not represent consumer satisfaction. It gauges how simple interactions are and how much effort customers put in.

7. Shorten Customer Response Times

The typical response time is a crucial indicator for reducing customer effort. In order to improve their customer experience, almost 65% of customers consider quick response to be a key statistic.

Instead of making several calls or starting lengthy conversations, respond to clients as soon as possible and concentrate on offering a solution in the first message. Live chat is one of the quickest ways to engage customers. Customers can get real-time assistance from it, and it lessens the volume of calls and emails.

The less effort a consumer has to expend to have their issues addressed and fixed, the quicker your response time is.

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12 Examples of Questions Customer Effort Score Surveys

You need trustworthy customer data from a focused customer effort score survey to create seamless customer service. Additionally, you need targeted questions to create a CES survey.

Here are some CES survey questions that were expertly created and that we still use internally:

1. How likely are you to tell your friends and relatives about the services after your encounter with our support agent today?
2. How difficult or simple was it to find answers to your questions?
3. Please rate your overall satisfaction with our customer service team.
4. How pleased are you with the performance of our customer service person, on a scale of 0 to 10?
5. Please give our customer service representatives a score based on their demeanor, speed, and product expertise.
6. How effective was our customer service agent in resolving your problem?
7. How can we continue to enhance our client service?
8. Have you got any other recommendations?
9. How would you rank the caliber of our customer service personnel on a scale of 1 to 10?
10. How simple was it to talk to our support person?
11. Was the service representative informed about your problem?
12. What part of our customer service was the most frustrating for you?

Here are some tips for using the CES question collection to increase the ROI on your CES survey:

• Start with a straightforward rating question, such as a Likert scale or numbered scale.
• If you want to add an open-ended question depending on the respondent’s response, use the Skip logic in your survey tool.
• Then, to examine more information from the responders, you might add a couple more questions.
• Keep in mind to keep the Customer Effort Score survey succinct and to the point, particularly if it is aimed at an unhappy client.

Frequently Asked Questions

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