Customer Effort Score (CES): What Is It and How To Optimize It

The phrase “the customer is king” is a familiar one in business. This shift in perspective reflects the increasing importance of customer satisfaction and loyalty when it comes to hitting business goals. How a customer experiences your brand is one important element that can impact your long-term success.

Customer experience might seem elusive or abstract, but you can distill it into a Customer Effort Score (CES). CES helps you, as a business owner, understand how easy it is for customers to do business with you.

The Customer Effort Score (CES) became a fixture in the business world following Harvard Business Review’s 2010 article, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers.” This article challenged the norm that businesses should focus on impressing customers. Instead, it made the case that companies should invest time and energy into making it easier for customers to complete their tasks.

The article emphasized that by improving CES, companies could significantly impact customer loyalty. From here, there was a growing interest in CES as a means to quantify the customer experience and identify areas for improvement.

In that article, the author noted that more than 90% of customers who reported low-effort experiences indicated a high likelihood of repurchasing. By taking the guesswork out of how to complete the tasks at hand, companies can win customers over time and time again. A high CES puts you on the path to building and sustaining a loyal customer base, a crucial factor for long-term success.

In simple terms, getting a handle on CES and the contributing factors can help you boost customer satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term results.

Definition of Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score (CES) helps you understand how much heavy lifting customers perceive they need to complete a task. You can arrive at this number by asking the following, “On a scale of 1 to 7, how much effort did you need to exert to get your issues resolved?”

Importance of Measuring Customer Effort

Measuring customer effort is an important exercise because of the insights it can unlock. For example, a customer effort score is useful because it can:

Predict Customer Loyalty

CES is one way to forecast customer loyalty and future purchases. That’s because individuals who associate low effort with your company are more likely to return and refer their friends and family.

Identify Pain Points

A high customer effort score means that customers are experiencing some frustration when interacting with your operation and/or employees. Getting to the bottom of these issues allows you to focus on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities to improve the customer experience (CX).

Improve Customer Satisfaction

Making it easy to do business with you can inspire greater customer satisfaction and loyalty. You can’t really overstate the importance and weight of either.

Limit Negative Customer Sentiment

The consequences of negative customer experiences can be high. You lose on several fronts in that your original customer hits the road. Worse yet, they might post negative reviews, and there’s little you can do about it. Customer Effort Score surveys can alert you to concerning trends, so you can do damage control instead of paying the price later.

Reduce Customer Service Costs

CES can give you a heads-up about the types of issues that might lead to a support ticket. The findings can help you lighten the load on the customer support team. You also might get helpful insights into where training and process improvements can introduce faster resolutions.

Promote Self-Service Channels

Most customers would prefer to find answers on their own rather than waiting for an answer from your company. In the survey, you could ask about how they feel about the quality of self-service features for whatever context.

Lead With User Experience

Be mindful of how long it takes for your customers to complete an online purchase. If it’s tedious and inconvenient, prospects might be apt to solicit a competitor instead. Use CES surveys to help determine if you need to tighten up any aspects of the UX to avoid lost sales.

What is a Customer Effort Score (CES)?

CES can help you get an idea of the general ease of interaction. It’s different from the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) because it specifically measures the required effort.

CES is quantitative in that it’s typically measured using a seven-point Likert scale. It’s a continuum and reflects a range from “very low effort” to “very high effort.” A lower CES score suggests a positive customer experience. Some businesses also use happy, sad, and neutral emoticons to capture customer sentiment.

While NPS measures customer loyalty and CSAT measures overall satisfaction, CES focuses on the specific effort required for interactions. CES can provide valuable insights in addition to NPS and CSAT.

How To Measure Your Customer Effort Score (CES)

To measure CES, first create a survey template that reflects the CES question. Then, distribute the survey to a sample group of your customer base. It’s best to pick a cross-section that represents your typical customer. There are ideal times to send the survey. You might see the most traction at the following times:

Directly After a Purchase

Staying top of mind is important. Right after they make a purchase, they can give feedback on the buying experience.

After a Customer Support Interaction

Your customer support team forms the first impression customers have of your business. They should simplify the process of getting help. You can employ a CES survey to identify holes in your processes or procedures that might negatively impact your CSAT and customer loyalty.

After Encounters With New Product Features

If you’ve recently introduced new features, CES surveys can be useful to uncover insights about their practicality. Ask open-ended questions to capture the most detail about the customer journey. You might share the customer effort score data with your UX team to help them iterate.

After you’ve put in the effort to garner insights about the CX, it’s time to crunch the numbers. Calculate the average CES score, and take the responses from the survey questions to heart to improve your operations.

You might wonder how you know if you have a good score. There are no hard and fast rules about what constitutes a good CES score. However, the prevailing wisdom is that scores above seven indicate a largely positive experience. Those below five indicate you might need to make some adjustments.

Monitoring your CES and CSAT survey data over time is a great way to determine whether you see a return on your investment. Sudden changes in these customer experience indicators and the Net Promoter Score can tip you off that you need to address issues before they spiral and lead to mass customer loss.

Other customer experience best practices to consider include:

Segment Feedback By Source

It’s helpful to be able to identify the nature of the pain points by type of survey. For example, do you see certain trends tied to certain segments of your customer base? Perhaps the issue lies with a particular customer service rep. It could also be related to a new product or feature that flopped. By demarcating this feedback, you can have a better idea of where you might need to dedicate customer experience resources.

Use a CX Platform

Poring over hundreds of data points is no small task. A CX platform can help you collect Likert scale feedback at scale and produce reports that present trends you can share with your customer service team.

Act on CES feedback

People are busy today. Respect customers’ time by following up on any customer issues indicated via survey questions responses. Doing so shows that you’re invested in their customer experience and value their loyalty.

Respond to Your Customers

Set up an autoresponder that communicates that customers’ voices have been heard. Share your plans for how you’ll take action on customer feedback and what customer journey issues might look like when resolved.

Create Automatic Alerts

Communicate CES feedback to the right team so they can see what customers think in the moment. You can also engineer it so that customer responses are directly transmitted to your support team, with flags like rating, comments, or other ways to classify customers.

5 Strategies to Reduce Customer Effort Score (CES)

You can invest your time and energy into areas that will pay off with a higher CES, in theory, as well as other metrics.

• Create intuitive user journeys: Confirm that the customer can navigate your website and other assets in a way that makes sense and gets them answers quickly.
• Simplify interactions at each touchpoint: Reduce the number of steps required for customers to complete tasks.
• Leverage self-service resources: Make FAQs, resource guides, or online chatbots available to reduce customer effort.
• Resolve issues on first contact: Train your customer support team to address customer issues promptly in one session, so customers are satisfied the first time.
• Adopt your grandma’s point of view: Make it easy for even those less familiar with tech to interact with your company and products.

These strategies can reduce customer effort, improve customer service metrics, boost customer satisfaction, and drive business growth. A high customer satisfaction score is the best compliment because it means their issues were resolved without having to go to great lengths.

Take Your CX to the Next Level With Podium

Podium can improve customer service metrics and customer satisfaction to help you get more referrals in several ways:

Streamlined Communication

Podium’s messaging platform allows businesses like yours to communicate with customers in real time across various channels, ensuring timely and efficient responses and lower customer churn.

Centralized Communication

Aggregating all interactions into a single platform means business owners can tend to conversations, ask follow-up questions more effectively, and avoid lost sales.

Enhanced Review Management

Podium’s review management tools enable businesses to proactively solicit and manage customer feedback and reviews, improving their online reputation and attracting new customers.

Personalized Interactions

Podium’s platform allows businesses to personalize touchpoints with customers, providing a more tailored and meaningful experience in all areas of the customer journey.

Improved Efficiency

Podium’s automation features can streamline workflows, reducing the time it takes to respond to customer inquiries and resolve issues.

Data-Driven Insights

Podium provides businesses with valuable data and analytics that can be used to identify areas for improvement, inform follow-up questions, track issues resolved, and boost customer satisfaction.

It’s time to create a more positive and satisfying customer experience, as indicated by high net promoter scores and positive CSAT and CES results. Customer loyalty, repeat business, and positive word-of-mouth can be within reach with Podium’s suite of customer experience tools. Making smart investments in tools can mean happier customers and more sales. Watch a demo today and learn how you can turn customer insights into opportunities.