What Is Customer Effort Score (CES) and How to Measure It
Confused about what a customer effort score is and why it’s relevant for you?
Customer effort score (CES) is the gold standard for SaaS organizations trying to improve their customer experience.
This metric focuses on analyzing user feedback to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction, both crucial for driving growth.
In this guide, we explore how to measure CES, why it matters, and how you can improve yours.
TL;DR
- Customer effort score (CES) measures the level of effort required for customers to interact with your product or service.
- Measure CES using customer effort score surveys prompted after specific customer interactions.
- The CES survey contains a statement asking customers to rate the ease of use on a scale.
- There is no universally accepted customer effort score benchmark. But it’s a good idea to aim for higher ratings of 6 or 7 on a 7-point scale.
- The CES metric helps you predict future purchase behavior, customer loyalty, and likelihood of referrals.
- It’s best to set up customer effort score surveys after interactions leading to conversion, interactions with the customer support team, onboarding completion, and subscription renewal or cancelation.
- Track additional KPIs to improve customer experience, including Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
- You can improve your CES score by reducing friction points, ensuring proactive support, introducing self-service options, and providing several communication channels for contact.
- Find the right tool to make performance tracking and user feedback analytics easier. Book a Userpilot demo today and see how it can help!
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What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?
The customer effort score measures how much effort customers need to exert to use your product or service, resolve an issue, or find the information they’re looking for.
Customer effort score surveys include a simple question, like “[X Company] made it easy for me to resolve my issue”.
Next, customers are asked to rate their experience on a scale, typically ranging from 1-5 or 1-7. , where 1 means strongly disagree and 7 means strongly agree.
The idea behind this customer satisfaction metric is that customers are more loyal to products that are easier to use.
How to measure your CES
You can measure customer effort score immediately by setting up triggers for it to appear after a specific customer interaction.
Let’s say a customer just finished talking to a customer service representative. Triggering a customer effort score survey after this customer interaction is useful to learn how satisfied they are with the support team.
Additionally, you can use several channels to collect CES surveys, such as the website, in-app surveys within the product interface, email, etc.
How to calculate customer effort score
Once you’ve gathered survey responses, the customer effort score calculation is simple. Here’s what the formula looks like:
Customer Effort Score (CES) = (No. of positive responses (ratings of 5, 6, or 7) / No. of total responses) x 100.
What is a good customer effort score?
It’s hard to define what counts as a good customer effort score.
Generally speaking, there is no universal benchmark to compare your score to. This is because various companies use different rating systems, leading to a varied average score as well.
However, a general rule of thumb is to aim for higher ratings on a 7-point scale.
Pros and cons of measuring CES
Every customer satisfaction metric comes with its pros and cons. Let’s look at some of these for the customer effort score.
Pros:
- Helps predict customer purchase behavior.
- Useful for forecasting customer loyalty and customer retention.
- Provides real-time customer feedback.
- Indicative of customer referral likelihood.
- Easy to implement across various channels.
- Unlocks customer experience insights for reducing churn.
Cons:
- Limited scope because it doesn’t examine the overall customer relationship with your business.
- Survey response bias could lead customers to answer inaccurately.
- Limited benchmarking makes it hard to gauge your CES performance.
Best times to use CES
Next, let’s look at some key use cases for the CES metric. These use cases highlight different interactions along the user journey after which it makes most sense to send CES surveys immediately.
1. After interactions that led to a conversion
Showing surveys after interactions leading to conversion is useful because that’s when customers are most engaged. Therefore, they’re more likely to provide accurate feedback.
Examples of such interactions could be users trying a new feature, successfully subscribing, or completing a purchase.
At such conversion points, ask relevant questions in your customer effort score survey like, “How easy was it to complete your recent purchase on our website?”
Plus, this customer feedback helps uncover whether a certain action is causing friction and, therefore, needs to be improved.
2. After interactions with customer support
Want to track how your customer service team is performing?
Do so by triggering a CES survey after customers interact with service reps.
This helps ensure that customers don’t have to go through a high-effort service interaction. It also points towards any areas for improvement.
A sample question for your CES survey measuring customer satisfaction with the support team could be, “How easy was it to get your issue resolved by our customer support team today?”
3. After onboarding
Creating a customer-centric onboarding process is an iterative struggle. Therefore, you need to constantly measure your onboarding resource’s performance so you can improve accordingly.
That’s where CES surveys come in. They’re a great resource for collecting feedback after user onboarding completion.
You can ask questions like, “How easy was it to set up your new account and get started with our product/service?”
4. After subscription renewals and cancellations
Assessing the CES score after subscription renewals and cancellations helps identify pain points in the customer journey.
Then, by incorporating this feedback into product improvements, you can increase customer loyalty and renewals.
Some sample questions include, “How easy was it to renew your subscription today?” or “How easy was it to cancel your subscription?”
How CES compares to other customer experience metrics
CES is a good metric for predicting customer retention and assessing the quality of the customer experience.
However, it is limited to specific customer interactions and doesn’t provide a full picture of customer loyalty or satisfaction.
That’s why it’s best you use other metrics alongside CES, like the ones below.
Net promoter score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty based on the customer’s likelihood of recommending your product or service to others.
NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors (ratings 0 to 6) from the percentage of promoters (ratings 9 or 10).
While CES focuses on the ease of completing specific tasks, NPS is different. It evaluates overall customer loyalty and also the likelihood of advocacy.
This is why NPS surveys are used more often at every customer journey point to monitor loyalty.
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
The customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures how satisfied customers are with your overall product or service on a scale from 1 to 5.
To calculate the customer satisfaction score, divide the number of satisfied customers (ratings 4 and 5) by the total responses and multiply by 100.
Similar to CES, the CSAT score is also measured at specific touchpoints, like a customer support call or a purchase.
However, the two are not interchangeable.
The CSAT survey focuses on overall satisfaction with an interaction. In contrast, the CES only measures the effort required for that interaction.
Key types of CES survey questions
There are several ways to structure your customer effort score surveys, using various rating scales. The most commonly used scales are discussed below.
Numbered scale
Numbered scales are typically 5-point or 7-point scales for measuring a customer’s level of agreement or satisfaction. The lower end of the scale corresponds to low satisfaction or agreement, whereas the opposite is true for a rating of 5 or 7.
For example, when asked whether a task was a low-effort experience, 10 respondents gave ratings of 5, 6, or 7. These 10 respondents are regarded as satisfied customers.
Lastly, numeric scales are useful when you quickly want to quantify qualitative aspects like opinions.
Likert scale
Use the Likert scale to quantitatively measure qualitative feedback, like opinions and attitudes.
This scale asks users to indicate their agreement level on a predefined scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”.
For example, you ask users if they think your product is innovative. Only 1 user out of 20 strongly agrees. This tells you that 5% of respondents strongly agree that your product is innovative.
Emoticon ratings
This rating scale uses emoticons, like smiley faces or icons, to rate customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
Emoticon ratings are preferred when you want quick responses. Furthermore, customers are more likely to fill out emoticon ratings because they are visually intuitive and more engaging.
The scale typically consists of 5 smiley faces, ranging from happy to sad, representing various sentiments customers might feel.
Whichever rating scale you choose, Userpilot can help you build in-app surveys and launch CES surveys as well.
Plus, you can analyze the results with a variety of survey performance tools available.
How to improve CES in your company?
If you’re struggling with a low CES score, here are some proven tips to help you out!
- Reduce friction points: Use CES data to pinpoint areas where customers struggle and add fixes where you spot issues. For example, if customers consistently report high effort in renewing subscriptions, that points towards friction within the process.
- Ensure first contact resolution: Train customer service reps to resolve issues effectively during the first interaction and think proactively, too. Let’s say there’s a potential issue reps know the user might face in the future, they should suggest resolving it right there.
- Provide self-service options: Self-service options enable users to troubleshoot independently. These options include FAQs, knowledge base articles, chatbots, in-app guides, tooltips, and interactive walkthroughs.
- Provide multiple channels for customers to reach you: Lastly, customers have varying needs. Therefore, they need diverse communication channels, like live chat, phone, email, social media, etc.
Conclusion
Customer effort score is a powerful metric that measures how easy and pleasant your customers’ interactions with your products or services are.
When measured together with NPS, CSAT, and other metrics, it provides important insights into the customer experience you create for your users.
Just remember: the more effort you put into delivering seamless customer experiences, the less effort customers will have to exert.
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