Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score, or CES, is a customer experience metric that measures the ease of client interaction with your company.
What is CES?
Customer Effort Score, or CES, is a customer experience metric that measures the ease of client interaction with your company. The metric addresses the level of effort that a customer needs to exert for a particular purpose, whether it is solving a problem, fulfilling a request or finding an answer to a certain question. In CES, customers get to rank their efforts based on a seven-point or five-point scale that ranges from “extremely difficult” to “extremely easy”.
What is the CES standard question?
Customer churn rate refers to the percentage of your customers who no longer purchase or interact with your business during a given period of time.
On a scale from 1 to 7, How easy was it for you to solve your issue today?
1 = Extremely Difficult.
2 = Very Difficult.
3 = Difficult.
4 = Neutral.
5 = Easy.
6 = Very Easy.
7 = Extremely Easy.
On a scale from 1 to 7, to what extent do you agree with the following statement: “The company made it easy for me to fulfill a request.”
1 = Strongly Disagree.
2 = Disagree.
3 = Somewhat Disagree.
4 = Neutral.
5 = Somewhat Agree.
6 = Agree.
7 = Strongly Agree.
Additionally, you may need to include some open-ended follow-up questions for the customers who respond with low scores to identify the reasons behind their dissatisfaction. An example for this could be: “What’s the main reason behind your feedback?”
What are the benefits of CES?
Adopting the CES model reaps numerous benefits to your business, including:
- Predicting the customer’s future behavior.
- Reducing or eliminating the processes that require high customer efforts.
- Examining the link between customer service and loyalty.
- Reacting quickly to customer problems and complaints.
- Providing effortless experience for customers while solving their problems or fulfilling their requests.
- Improving the ability to find the weaknesses at different customer touchpoints.
- Enhancing each stage of the customer journey.
- Making it easier to identify high-effort areas and take actions to optimize the customer experience.
- Measuring and improving the digital experience, UI & UX.
When to use CES?
As a transactional metric, CES survey can be applied at various cases, such as:
- Immediately after a customer interaction (e.x. purchase or subscription).
- Following a customer service interaction to measure the performance of your team effectively.
How to calculate CES?
The CES score is calculated by finding the average of all responses, as in the following equation:
CES = (The total sum of all responses) / (The number of responses)
For example:
If the 10 responses that you received were: (5, 7, 5, 3, 7, 7, 6, 6, 2, 3)
CES = (5+7+5+3+7+7+6+6+2+3) ÷ (10) = 5.1
The added-value of CES
The CES will give you the ability to:
- Monitoring and tracking your performance in handling customer issues or responding to their requests.
- Recognizing trends and fluctuations to determine whether you are on the right track or there are gaps in your customer experience system.
- Identifying the reasons behind the low CES score through open-ended questions and following up with the dissatisfied customers.
- Visualizing and enhancing the entire customer experience process.
- Performing segmental analysis, with the ability to categorize the data by company, product, service, staff, nationality, age group, gender, transaction, among others.
- Benchmarking your CES results with your competitors.