Ever wondered why some businesses seem to effortlessly retain customers while others struggle? What if there was a simple metric that could dramatically improve your customer experience and boost your bottom line? And how can you implement this game-changing strategy without overhauling your entire business?
The Customer Effort Score (CES) is a simple yet powerful metric that top companies use to measure and improve upon their customer satisfaction.
A good CES score could reduce customer disloyalty from 96% to 9%. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, that’s exactly what the research done by Gartner suggests while comparing high and low effort scores.
This blog will explain why CES is the go-to metric for industry leaders to measure customer satisfaction. We’ll unpack what makes it such a powerhouse and offer some juicy strategies for boosting your CES. Get ready to transform your customer satisfaction game and watch your business soar!
What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?
Customer effort score is a simple metric indicating how much effort the customer had to exert to resolve their query, purchase a product or service etc. The concept was first introduced by the Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner) in 2010 and is now a key part of customer experience management.
The principle behind CES is simple: When customers have to put less effort into resolving an issue, they feel more satisfied and are more likely to make more purchases from that business. This concept shifts the focus from faster customer resolution to having higher customer satisfaction levels.
Let’s look at two scenarios I faced while purchasing food from two different delivery applications-
Scenario 1: I received the food and realized it was in the wrong order. I wanted to demand a refund. I had to navigate a long phone menu, wait on hold for 30 minutes, and then go through a complicated refund process.
Scenario 2: I faced a similar issue while ordering food from another app. In this case, as soon as I informed the service team that the order was wrong, they immediately responded by offering me a full refund. The refund was processed and received within the hour.
The second delivery app improved my satisfaction and retained a loyal customer by reducing the effort I had to put into resolving my issue.
Customers who experience negative experiences, like I did with the first app, are more likely to leave negative reviews of your product or service. Positive experiences, like the one I received with the second case, tend to lead to positive reviews and feedback.
How to Calculate Customer Effort Score
Calculating CES involves surveying customers after an interaction or transaction. The survey asks one question:
On a scale of 1 to 7, how easy was it to deal with our company today?
1= Very easy
7 = Very difficult
The formula for calculating CES is also very simple:
Add up all the scores and divide by the number of respondents and you have your CES score.
Let’s say you got the following scores from 10 customers: 6, 7, 5, 6, 4, 7, 6, 5, 3, 6
By dividing the sum total of scores by the total number of responders a CES of 5.5 is obtained.
A CES score of 5.5 indicates that customers consistently face difficult service experiences.
How to interpret CES Scores
CES scores can be broadly classified into 3 types-
- Scores below 3: Low effort, good customer experience
- Scores 3-5: Moderate effort, needs improvement
- Scores above 5: High effort, bad customer experience
Pro tip: Remember CES should be interpreted in context. A good score in one industry might be average in another. And tracking your CES over time is key to see trends and measure the impact of your customer experience initiatives.
How CES Can Help a Business
“Exceeding customer expectations provides, at best, a marginal lift to customer loyalty; our research finds that to win customer loyalty, customer service and support leaders must focus on consistently meeting customer expectations.”
– Andrew Schumacher, Senior Principal-Advisory, Gartner
Implementing CES can bring many benefits to your business:
- A Reliable Indicator of Customer Loyalty: According to CEB, CES is 1.8 times more predictive of customer loyalty than CSAT scores. Having good CES means customers enjoy interacting with your business more, increasing their loyalty to your company.
- Increased Revenue: Lowering customer effort can lead to more cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. Siegel+Gale found that 55% of customers are willing to pay more for a simpler experience.
- Operational Efficiency: By focusing on reducing customer effort, businesses often simplify their processes and save costs. The Corporate Executive Board found that low effort experiences reduced the cost overall sales operations by 40%.
- Employee Satisfaction: When customers have low effort experiences it means fewer frustrated customers and happier employees. This can reduce staff turnover and associated costs.
Here is an example:
A telecom company implemented CES and discovered that many of its customers found its bills hard to understand. It redesigned its billing statements to be clearer and more user-friendly and saw a 15% reduction in billing-related support calls and a 10% increase in on-time payments.
Utilizing CES helps you identify key touchpoints that a business can improve on to ease customer experience; by acting on these areas of improvement, you will notice a significant surge in customer satisfaction and retention.
LeadSquared CRM can help you achieve these benefits by giving you a 360-degree view of your customer interactions. With features like interaction tracking and customer journey mapping, you can identify high-effort touchpoints and take proactive action to fix them.
“LeadSquared’s intuitive platform simplifies customer interactions by streamlining processes like lead management and customer engagement, which reduces the effort customers need to make at every touchpoint. With responsive and knowledgeable product support, we ensure that challenges are quickly addressed, further enhancing the customer experience and improving the Customer Effort Score (CES).”
-Digvijay Patel, Team lead – Product support, LeadSquared
Integrating CES with Other Metrics
While CES is a powerful metric on its own, it’s more powerful when used with other customer experience metrics. Here’s how CES can work with other popular metrics:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures customer loyalty and likelihood to recommend your business. When used with CES, you can know not just if a customer would recommend you but why. For example, high CES (low effort) often correlates with high NPS.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): CSAT measures how satisfied a customer is with a specific interaction or product. CES provides context to CSAT scores. For example, a customer might be satisfied with a product (high CSAT) but find the buying process difficult (low CES).
- First Contact Resolution (FCR): FCR measures the percentage of customer issues resolved in a single interaction. High FCR often correlates with high CES as customers like not to have to follow up multiple times.
- Average Handle Time (AHT): AHT measures the average duration of a customer interaction. Low AHT is generally good but should be balanced with CES to ensure speed isn’t compromising the ease of resolution.
A software company had high NPS, but customer retention wasn’t improving. After implementing CES, they found that customers loved their product (high NPS) but found the onboarding process difficult (low CES). This insight helped them simplify the onboarding; they saw a 20% improvement in customer retention after acting on these insights.
LeadSquared CRM has integrations with various customer experience tools so you can view CES alongside other metrics. This gives you a complete view to make better decisions on your customer experience strategy.
Key Strategies to Improve CES
Improving your Customer Effort Score is an ongoing process. Here are some ways to do it:
1. Simplify Customer Service Channels: Ensure customers can reach you through their preferred channels whether it’s phone, email, chat or social media. LeadSquared’s omnichannel capabilities can help you manage all these touchpoints.
2. Empower Your Employees: Give your customer service reps the authority to resolve issues without escalation whenever possible. This reduces effort for both customers and employees.
3. Self-Service Options: According to Gartner 70% of customers prefer to use self-service options for simple issues. Build a comprehensive knowledge base, FAQs and intuitive self-service portals to reduce customer effort.
4. Personalize Interactions: Use customer data to personalize interactions and anticipate needs.
5. Proactive Communication: Don’t wait for customers to reach out with issues. Use data analytics to predict potential problems and address them proactively.
6. Continuous Feedback Loop: Collect and act on customer feedback regularly. Use CES surveys after key interactions to identify pain points and areas for improvement.
7. Optimize Digital Touchpoints: Ensure your website and mobile apps are user-friendly and intuitive. Regular usability testing must be conducted to identify and fix friction points.
Conclusion
In today’s customer-centric business world, reducing customer effort is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s a must-have strategy for success.
By reducing customer effort you can increase loyalty, increase revenue and get a competitive advantage.
Implementing and improving your CES strategy doesn’t have to be a big task. With the right tools and approach, you can transform your customer experience and benefit from increased customer loyalty and business growth.
This is where LeadSquared CRM excels. From calculating and tracking your CES to providing actionable insights and enabling personalized customer interactions, LeadSquared has a complete solution for your CES strategy. By using LeadSquared’s advanced features, you can not only measure customer effort but also work towards reducing it across all touchpoints.
“The greatest indicator of customer loyalty is how easy you make it for your customers to do business with you.”
So, are you ready to reduce customer effort and get the most out of your business? With CES as your compass and LeadSquared as your navigator, you’re on your way to creating effortless experiences that will keep your customers coming back.
