Customer Effort Score: What Is It?




A customer experience metric called the customer effort score (CES) measures the amount of work a consumer must put in to get their request handled. This could entail receiving information, getting a problem fixed, making a purchase of a product, or signing a contract.

CES is a crucial indicator because customer happiness frequently depends on how simple a brand is to work with. The peer-to-peer review website G2, which gives out an “Easiest to Work With” accolade for each product category, has given it priority.

Why is it vital to measure customer effort?

Customers desire seamless interactions with brands more and more often. Businesses can improve how their consumers interact with them by identifying areas that need change with a high customer effort score.

It’s crucial to remember that a customer effort score won’t tell the whole story. To really understand how people feel about a brand, it should be watched and examined along with other customer satisfaction measures (such as a net promoter score).

How is the client effort score calculated?

Quick surveys that ask consumers if meeting their demands was tough or easy can be used to calculate customer effort scores. How simple was it to deal with [business name] on a scale from “very easy” to “very difficult? That’s one way to phrase the question.

Format-wise, brands frequently employ Likert scales, which have a range of five to seven points. In their place, brands have also employed face emojis to represent various levels of experience-related emotion.

If they had to spend a lot of time searching your knowledge base in vain for an answer, they might have said “very difficult” instead. Alternatively, if you’ve included intelligent filters that make it easier to sort material and follow up via chat, you can receive a “very easy” rating.

If you want to express your customer effort score in numbers, divide the total number of survey replies by the sum of customer effort ratings (if you’ve assigned a number to each type of response).

When should customer effort be assessed?

Surveys of customer effort should be used rarely and wisely to avoid having a detrimental impact on the customer experience. They work well in the following three situations:

immediately following a conversation that resulted in a purchase or subscription. This is a crucial point in the client journey; therefore, getting it right is crucial. You can configure the inquiry to show underneath the purchase confirmation message to minimize disturbance.

Immediately following a conversation with the customer support staff. Text conversations with your consumers, whether through email or chat, are a terrific way to get their feedback on their shopping experiences. Their responses should demonstrate how effective your customer support representatives and self-help resources are in resolving user issues.

to support UI or UX testing conducted by the product team. A customer effort survey can be a useful tool if your product team is introducing new UI or UX features to determine whether the feature is superior, inferior, or interchangeable with the one it replaces.

A customer effort score is one statistic used to analyze customer satisfaction, as was previously noted, it shouldn’t be relied upon to give a whole picture of the customer experience. Teams should instead use it as a component of a more comprehensive customer satisfaction performance strategy.