Customer Effort Score, explained (+5 ways to improve it)
Learn the best ways to make life easier for your customers by tracking your Customer Effort Score.
Last updated April 18, 2023
In today’s digital world of instant gratification, convenience is king. Movies, music, and meals are always just a couple of clicks away. Practically everything you used to go to a brick-and-mortar location for can now be placed in your online shopping cart.
As the buying experience becomes more effortless, thecustomer serviceexperience has to keep up. After all, a consumer base that’s used to getting what it needs in real-time doesn’t want to listen to hours of hold music.
If you want to retain more customers, ensure you’re making life easier for them by tracking your Customer Effort Score—then find new ways to improve it.
What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?
Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the amount of effort a customer has to expend to get what they need from your company—whether that’s resolving an issue, finding an answer to a question, or completing a specific action. The ultimate goal of CES is to provide customers with a low-effort experience.
Companies determine their CES through surveys that typically ask buyers to rate the ease of their interaction on a scale of “very easy” to “very difficult.” A high CES indicates low customer effort or mostly easy interactions. A low CES score indicates high customer effort and, most likely, a lot of unhappy customers.
Why Customer Effort Score matters
CES becomes powerful with context. By tracking the metric across support channels and interactions, you and your team can determine which experiences are seamless and which are causing friction.
Your CES may suggest that the majority of your customers struggle with one action but not others. You might discover that customers find it “very easy” to reach your contact center by phone but “somewhat difficult” to navigate the self-service options. This information can help you make the necessary adjustments to improve customer loyalty and retention.
When to use Customer Effort Score
There are three scenarios in which it’s particularly beneficial for teams to calculate and track CES scores:
- Directly after a customer’s interaction with your support team. This will allow you to assess whether agents are making it easy for customers to solve their problems.
- To supplement your product team’s user interface (UI) anduser experience (UX)testing. CES will provide this team with feedback about how simple it is for customers to navigate your product.
- When a customer interaction (e.g., downloading a white paper) leads directly to a purchase or subscription.
Regularly sending CES surveys will allow you to identify difficult aspects of the customer experience that should be improved.
What are Customer Effort Score surveys?
Customer Effort Score surveys are short questionnaires sent to current customers to gauge how easy or difficult it was for them to complete a specific task. There are typicallythree types of CES surveyscompanies use:
- A0–10 scale(where 0 equals “very difficult,” and 10 equals “very easy)” or aLikert scaleof five to seven choices ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”
- A straightforwardagree/disagreequestionnaire
- A simple questionnaire with anemoji or emoticon rating system/ /
The calculations for the scale surveys differ from the agree/disagree and emoji/emoticon surveys (more on this later).
Keep in mind that CES isn’t the only way to gauge customer effort. Othercustomer service metrics您应该监视包括:
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
- Net Promoter Score® (NPS)
- Number of touches between your customers and your agents
- Number of times the average customer contacts your team
- Ticket handle time
- Requester wait time
- First reply time
How to create a CES survey
Collect customer feedbackvia a short-and-sweet CES survey soon after an interaction. Here are a few examples ofCustomer Effort Score questionsto include in a survey:
- On a scale of [0–10], how easy was it for you to resolve your issue?
- [Name of your business] was able to fix my problem quickly and accurately.
- How much effort did you put in to find the answer to your question?
- On a scale of [0–5], how simple was it for you to [request a demo]?
With Zendesk, you can useapp integrationsto trigger a survey immediately after specific customer interactions—like a ticket update or issue resolution.
If your CRM doesn’t have this built-in functionality, there are several free tools you can use to create and send customer effort surveys. BothTypeformandSurvicatehave CES survey templates you can customize and use to collect customer effort data. You could even useGoogle Formsto build a CES survey.
Whatever tool or template you use, always include an open-ended question so your customers can provide valuable feedback to your teams.
CES survey examples
Get inspiration for your own CES survey with these great examples.
Image source:Typeform
Image source:Survicate
How to structure your customer service department
Learn more about the key steps for structuring your customer service team with this free guide.
How to calculate Customer Effort Score
Once you receive the CES survey results, it’s time to calculate your Customer Effort Score. If you sent a 10-point scale or a Likert scale survey, use this CES formula to find your score:
Customer Effort Score formula
Sum of CES scores ÷ Number of survey responses = CES
If you’re using anagree/disagree scale, subtract the percentage of negative responses from the percentage of positive responses to determine your CES.
Percentage of positive responses – Percentage of negative responses = CES
If you’re using anemoticon/emoji scale, you’ll also subtract the percentage of negative responses from the percentage of positive responses to calculate your CES. (Ignore neutral answers.)
Percentage of positive responses – Percentage of negative responses = CES
Say you send out a survey, and 300 respondents complete it. Of these responses, 250 of them are positive, and 50 are negative. First, you’ll determine the percentages of each type of response:
- [(250 ÷ 300) x 100 ] x 100 =83.33% positive
- [(50 ÷ 300) x 100] x 100 =16.66% negative
- 83.33 – 16.66 =66.67
Now, find your CES by subtracting the negative percentage from the positive percentage:
The higher the CES, the easier it is for your customers to get what they want and need from your company. When the customer experience is effortless, buyers are more likely to stick around. So, a good Customer Effort Score can help reduce churn, too.
What is a good Customer Effort Score?
It’s critical to remember thata high CES is a good CES. But also bear in mind that there isn’t an established benchmark or industry standard for CES. You’re only competing against your own previous scores. Regardless, CES scores are important customer satisfaction metrics to track regularly.
如果你的CES低于你想它isn’t increasing over time, you and your support team should focus your internal efforts on answering the following questions:
- How many different places did your customers have to go to find an answer?
- Was the issue resolved after one ticket? Or did the customer need to reach out again about a similar or related issue afterward?
- 花了多长时间去通过每个接触点of the customer journey to resolution?
- Were there processes or obstacles that got in the way of resolving the issue?
- What were the resources, workflows, or skills that enabled a quicker resolution?
- Do your agents have the resources they need to provide accurate solutions?
- How are you currently tracking and implementing improvements based on customer and agent feedback?
By addressing these questions and getting ahead of any issues, you’ll have a jump-start on raising your CES.
5 ways to improve your Customer Effort Score
From overhauling workflows to providing additionalcustomer service training, there are various ways to boost buyer satisfaction and reduce customer effort.
1. Give agents the tools they need to delight customers
Create an effortless experience for your agents so they can offer the same to your customers. Providing your team with a strong tech stack will help make this possible.
Zendesk, for example, allows agents to create prewritten responses to common support inquiries. Theseeasy-to-use macroscan be deployed with just one click, ensuring fast customer responses.
Your team should also have an internalknowledge management systemso they can quickly look up information and provide solutions. Zendesk’sKnowledge Capture appenables agents to search for knowledge base articles in a ticket view and suggests articles based on the language of the ticket.
Once you adopt support tools, collect and act on your agents’ feedback about potential improvements that could empower them to be more helpful to customers.
2. Practice solution-oriented support training
Regularly review examples of interactions as a team and see if you can collectively spot opportunities to lower customer effort.Call listening, for instance, is a good way to coach phone support agents. Recorded calls can also be used as examples for additional training. If agents feel uncomfortable sharing their calls, consider conducting this coaching one-on-one.
Here are a few other training tactics that could help improve CES:
- Ensure agents are familiar with your products and services.Consumers don’t like being transferred from agent to agent, and they certainly don’t like waiting. So, it’s never a good strategy to put a customer on hold while your agent finds a more knowledgeable team member who can answer questions about your company’s offerings.
- Give agents the authority and autonomy to solve customer issues.If support agents must consistently ask for permission to make decisions that will solve customer issues, it will cause bottlenecks and delays in the resolution process.
- Empower agents with soft skills.Customers want to interact with friendly, supportive agents who will listen to them, solve their problems, and communicate effectively. Make sure your teams are practicing these soft skills, or risk decreasing your CES.
3. Offer self-service options
Are your agents often spending time working on password resets and answering basic invoice questions? UseAI-powered chatbotsto handle common support requests instead.
Bots can answer most simple questions instantly, making interactions faster and more convenient for your customers. They also free up your support team—especially when combined with otherself-service resourcessuch asFAQ pagesandknowledge bases—to assist customers with more complex issues.
By reducing wait times and providing ample resources for customers to find solutions on their own, you’re eliminating unnecessary friction and empowering your buyers to get the solutions they need.
4.及其ment an omnichannel support strategy
Today’s consumers desireomnichannel customer service: the ability to seamlessly move conversations from one support channel to another. Delivering this type of experience is critical to lowering customer effort and increasing retention.
TheZendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2022found that 91 percent of customers will spend more with companies that offer their preferred option to reach customer service. Customers are also increasingly opting for social messaging apps when connecting with companies. Support inquiries via WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and regional favorites like WeChat and LINE jumped 36 percent in 2021—higher than any other communication channel.
Zendesk’sunified agent workspaceprovides your team with a single resource to access every customer ticket and every communication channel. Agents can easily toggle between these tickets and channels, so relevant context is never lost. When agents have all customer information readily available in one workspace, it makes it easier (and faster) for them to take care of customer issues.
5. Dive into customer data
Evaluate your customers’ feedback so you can better understand the reasoning behind their CES rating. If needed, follow up with buyers to ask about the difficulties they experienced when using your product or service.
段CES数据来识别领域即兴表演ement, too. For example, it’s a good idea to compare the CES for each customer service channel. If customers find it “very easy” to get answers by calling customer service but find it “difficult” to use your help desk, it’s clear which channel you need to focus on.
You can also categorize your support requests by task, like “Account Creation” or “Shopping Cart.” If a task’s CES indicates that it was high-effort, analyze customers’ open-ended survey responses to determine where a roadblock may have occurred.
Reducing agent effort also reduces customer effort
There’s a direct connection between agent effort and Customer Effort Score. Many of the tools that make life easier for your support agents—such as macros, self-service options, and unified workspaces—also make life easier for your buyers. When agents are empowered to resolve tickets quickly and conveniently, it’s the customers who reap the rewards.
How to structure your customer service department
Learn more about the key steps for structuring your customer service team with this free guide.
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