What is the Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is the metric that measures the degree of effort that a customer puts in while making a purchase, resolving an issue, or otherwise interacting with a company/product. Customer service teams use surveys to assess the customer effort on the scale ranging from ‘very easy’ to ‘very difficult’.

Imagine a customer calls up her insurance company to upgrade or add a new service, but she feels she spent too much time getting her job done. This experience, apart from not adding any value, might lead her to think about switching to another competitor next time, hence impacting the churn rate of the company. We are in the era in which customers expect all the issues to be solved in one click, without any hassles or delay. They are looking for an easy way out and appreciate the idea of a clutter-free life with no obstacles.

On the positive side, did you know that 94% of customers who report a low level of effort would repurchase products from the business and 88% would spend more according to the Harvard Business Review. The HBR article entitled “Stop Trying To Delight Your Customers” sums up very well to create loyal customers, how important it is to focus on easing their problems.
As per the research from Gartner, addressing customer issues in a low-effort manner can be a step towards value enhancement and reaping customer loyalty.

The science behind CES

Recent researches make an important discovery: if one tries to delight the customer and fulfill their expectations without considering the ease factor then they might end up disappointed. In fact, in 2010, CEB researchers found that reducing the amount of effort a customer has to do to get their problem solved relates to a higher indicator of loyalty. A deeper insight can be found in the book, The Effortless Experience that states: “96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience. In a nutshell, companies have to be mindful of the effort that customers put in to resolve their problems. Although this ease factor, your company's CES, definitely impacts the brand loyalty, it cannot ensure that the customer will use their business in future. The CES truly reflects the rate of ease of interaction, but it doesn’t predict the customer retention. However, it was observed that CES helped reduce additional costs related to the customer service. These tangible facts proved the importance of ease over delight, and this is how CES came onto the picture.

When to measure Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Measuring the KPIs at the right time plays an important role on the accuracy of your results, and it makes us wonder when the Customer Effort Score should be measured. Well, the answer is at all points of interaction between the customer and the product or service.

• After individual interactions with customer support (e.g. phone calls, chat boxes, social media, etc.) - CES surveys should be sent out following the customer support interaction in order to resolve their issue will invariably provide a clear picture of the quality of the interaction.
• After purchase of a product/service - The best time to get the real time feedback is handing out the surveys just after the purchase of a product or service. Having the timely feedback will help to perceive the accurate picture of customer loyalty.
• Other situations to capture the customer-effort score are sign-ups, website visits, online checkouts or customer meetings/consultations.

What is the objective of CES?

In essence, the objective of measuring CES score is to remove all the obstacles and make the customers feel like a trouble-free experience. It is the best way to capture the positive and negative reviews and remove the friction to create a positive customer experience. It does not only measure the discrete levels of user experience, the Customer Effort Score metric also enables to gauge the overall customer loyalty for the brand.

Customer Effort Score Question

So what steps need to be taken to make sure that customers have more positive interactions and fewer negative ones?
First we collect the data by surveying the customers after the point of purchase or interaction. This allows us to obtain the CES score which helps in ascertaining customer loyalty.