What is the Customer Effort Score

Though there are a number of ways to measure the customer satisfaction, yet most of them follow a simple survey. Here we’ll discuss about Customer Effort Score (CES), a popular methodology for customer satisfaction.

Though there are a number of ways to measure the customer satisfaction, yet most of them follow a simple survey. Here we’ll discuss about Customer Effort Score (CES), a popular methodology for customer satisfaction.

Customer Effort Satisfaction is a form of survey done by the company to determine the satisfaction or the experience of the customers with the company.

It is many a time witnessed that customer’s given experience is a better indicator of customer loyalty that simply measuring direct customer satisfaction. This makes CES a popular methodology accepted by most of the companies.

When to use CES?

CES can be used to measure the overall experience someone has with your company, but because the question indicates a separate and isolate user experience, it is most often used to measure service or product level issues. Therefore most of the companies use CES surveys just after a customer service action or perhaps immediately after reading an article or any writing to know how effective or helpful it was on the customers (readers).

How Customer Effort Score works

CES asks customers specifically to rate the effort level that the company has put into resolving any particular issue. So it doesn’t make sense to send it at regular intervals. Rather it would be best to send CES surveys only after specific service or the resolution of any issue. CES surveys must be conducted among those customers who had recently contacted your company for any trouble shooting and you have just resolved their issue, so as to know how much effort it took on their part to reach you for a solution.

CSAT differs from CES on the ground that it generally gathers information about the customer’s satisfaction with your business as well as specific touchpoints. CES is concentrated on a specific event or a circumstance instigated by the customer.

Though CES survey topic may vary as per the content of the event, yet it has to be immediately after the event. CES is measured by sending the customers an automated post interaction survey asking them to rate, or give opinion on a specific statement on a defined scale, depending on the interaction they had just completed.

Some pros and cons of CES

Some pros include:

• It’s the strongest predictor of future purchase behaviour.
• It’s a strong predictor of referral likelihood, as 81% of customers reporting high effort say they would speak negatively about the company to others.
• It’s highly specific and actionable.

Some cons include:

• Does not provide information regarding the customer’s overall relationship with your business.
• Lack of segmentation by type of customer.