Customer Effort Scores – everything you need to know

What’s the key to business success? Your customers. If you want your venture to be successful, countering customer problems and offering a great experience is essential. Customer Effort Scores, or CES, allow you to measure how easy it is for customers to complete tasks, providing valuable insights into how they think and feel when engaging with your brand or product. In this post, we’ll discuss why Customer Effort Scores are important and show you how to collect – and put into action – meaningful data from these scores. Let’s dive in!

What is a Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Scores are a metric used to measure the amount of effort required to complete a task. It’s a way for businesses to assess customer satisfaction and identify areas in which they can improve their processes.

CES scores take into account the number of steps needed to complete a goal, as well as how difficult it was for customers to successfully complete that task. It’s an effective way to determine the effectiveness of customer service, sales processes, and technical support offerings.

Related content: What is help desk support / technical support?

How Do You Collect CES Scores?

Customer Effort Scores can be collected through a variety of methods, including surveys, interviews and focus groups. Businesses can also use automated data-gathering tools such as web analytics to track customer behaviour.

These scores allow companies to gain insight into how customers interact with their products or services, helping them identify areas where they can improve the customer experience.

Related content: Guide to Customer Satisfaction Surveys

When crafting a Customer Effort Score survey, there are two main formats you can use – the Likert Scale or Emoticon Ratings. A Likert Scale consists of a five to seven-point system, using numbers associated with phrases like “extremely difficult” and “extremely easy”, where a lower score means low effort and a higher score reflects more effort.

On the other hand, emoticon ratings focus on smiley faces and sad faces to represent the various levels of effort based on questions such as “[Your Company Name] made it easy for me to use their site”. Whichever method is chosen, surveys should be straightforward so that customers can submit an accurate rating without confusion.

Good times to measure CES scores

Measuring your customer experience score (CES) at the right time can help assess customer satisfaction and help you identify areas of improvement. Good times to measure CES are immediately after an interaction that led to a purchase, subscription, or service-related experience.

This will give insight into how customers feel about their shopping or service experience and provide valuable feedback for refining processes and enhancing the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX).

It is also beneficial to include periodic surveys as part of UI and UX testing to assess customer satisfaction in specific scenarios – such as using a self-service channel or accessing your live chat. Doing this gives your company a better understanding of the customer journey and an idea of what factors should be improved.

What Questions Should You Ask?

When collecting Customer Effort Scores, businesses should use questions that directly measure the effort customers have put into completing their tasks. Some example questions you can ask are:

• How easy was it for you to complete your goal?
• Was the process clear and intuitive?
• Did you encounter any issues when trying to complete the task?
• How likely is it that you would recommend our product/service to others?
• What could we do to make the process easier?

Advantages and disadvantages of using CES

Measuring customer effort via CES helps businesses identify opportunities for process improvement and can provide an effective way of tracking customer satisfaction over time. On the other hand, CES is a limited method of measurement because it doesn’t provide detailed insights into the root causes of difficulties and doesn’t account for customer loyalty or desired outcomes.

Ultimately, while CES represents an important first step in measuring customer satisfaction, its findings should be used in combination with other analytics tools to inform more complete reflections on overall customer experience.

What You Can Do with CES Scores

Customer Effort Scores allow businesses to gain insights into customer satisfaction levels and identify areas where they can improve their processes. Companies can use this data to create better experiences for their customers, offering them personalized solutions that save time and energy.

CES scores can also be used to evaluate customer support employee performance, helping managers ensure that teams are providing excellent service. Finally, this data can be used to help businesses develop new products or services that address customer pain points – ensuring a positive experience from start to finish.

Ready to get started? Digital Customer Care Company can help businesses with measuring their CES scores as well as implementing any changes based on findings from those measurements – so don’t hesitate to reach out today!