In the current competitive landscape, it is easy for customers to switch to another brand or company if doing business with you becomes inconvenient or challenging to reach out to.
This makes it crucial to know your Customer Effort Score (CES).
What is CES in Customer Experience?
Customer Effort Score (CES) is a critical contact center metric derived from a customer satisfaction survey. It helps us know how easy or difficult the customers find it to do business with your company or the brand.
A Customer Effort Score survey reflects a customer's effort to use a product or service, find the correct information they need, or resolve a problem.
In particular, it asks the customers to rate the effort needed to use your products and services on a scale of “very difficult” to “very easy.” It measures a product or service’s ease of use to customers.
Correlation between CES, NPS, and CSAT
Customer Effort Score (CES) is the only metric that helps measure Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) more precisely.
Customer Effort Score and Net Promoter Score go hand in hand and conclude and understand the Customer Satisfaction of your brand and service.
To differentiate CES and NPS:
CES – Customer Effort Score
This may require multiple-question surveys at each stage to understand the score for different parts of the service.
It is used for specific touchpoints and interactions along the way.
NPS – Net Promoter Score
It is asked as a simple one-question survey to the customers and measures how likely they are to promote or recommend your brand and service to others.
It is used during neutral touchpoints and at the end of the customer’s journey so that it doesn’t trigger the customer’s impression about their last far-reaching interaction.
Why is Customer Effort Score important?
The more effort and time a customer is required to give, the less happy they are and the more likely they will leave.
That makes it very important to measure your customer effort score. It helps your business by focusing on the current customer journey and catering to their needs. Which in turn makes the overall customer experience better.
By giving the best customer experience, you will have loyal, long-term customers invested in your business. Thus, having a primary solid line and the crux of your business sorted.
According to Harvard Business Review, in a business, a variety of customers give a different approach in terms of service and purchase. It is essential to measure agent performance and monitor customer satisfaction with an omnichannel platform to provide a good customer experience.
When is it necessary to Use Customer Effort Score
It is necessary to know when to send out a CES survey. It is always after:
Purchases or sales interaction
Delivery
Online check-in and checkouts
Customer service interaction (on all channels)
Service sign-ups and program schedules
Meeting or consultations
Once the survey is collected and collated, the overall CES is estimated.
What is a Good Customer Effort Score?
There isn’t any standard benchmarking for CES percentage. The less effort the customer requires to use your brand or service, the higher the Customer Effort Percentage.
It is always good to keep the CES percentage as high as possible for the far-reaching of the brand and good customer retention. It is considered a good CES if it is above 75%.
How do you Measure and Calculate a Customer Effort Score?
For determining the Customer Effort Score, a survey using the 5-point scale method is collected from your customers in the form of star ratings or emoticons.
Here’s an example,
The Customer Effort Score can be calculated by determining the percentage of positive responses (Very easy or easy) and negative responses (Difficult or very difficult). Then, you will get your CES score by subtracting the negative responses from the positive ones.
The Customer Effort Score can also be calculated by dividing the sum of all customer effort scores by the total number of survey responses. This result will amount to your customers' average effort while connecting with your business.
How do you reduce or improve Customer Effort Scores?
Predict customers’ follow-up questions and dynamically address them.
Use self-service tools like enabling chatbots and make self-serving easy to understand and operate for a faster resolution for simple queries.
Train the representatives to steer the ideological side of the business since a well-trained agent would improve customer satisfaction by providing quick and correct detailed responses.
Collect feedback from both – customers and representatives.
High employee effort = High customer effort, so reduce the employee effort and empower the team to solve the problem more innovatively.
Reduce wait time and hold time.
Have a good, sound customer service management system and software that helps give the customer a faster resolution and reduces the required customer effort.
Commentaires