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Customer effort score, CES, is a great way to check for process-based frustration. With self-service touchpoints multiplying and customer opinion of service low, improving CES can boost loyalty.
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Introduced in 2010 with a pivotal study of over 75,000 customers, CES is more than just a metric, it’s one of the best predictors of customer loyalty. CES offers a direct window into the ease, or difficulty, customers encounter navigating touchpoints. It’s a golden opportunity to uncover and rectify loyalty-eroding issues.
When it comes to self-service, there are clear objectives: customer convenience and operational efficiency. In this sphere, CES takes on special significance because a poor score suggests not only that the touchpoint has missed the target, but also that customer loyalty might be in jeopardy. So, here are seven steps to reshape self-service and retain customers using CES.
Several factors contribute to enhancing customer convenience and optimizing costs. These goals and needs align with CES and underscore the powerful role it can play in customer-centric strategy.
Customers crave control over when and how their queries get resolved, especially when juggling busy schedules. Self-service options that cater to this need, and empower customers, have low-effort scores and low levels of escalation.
Self-service users have one thing on their minds: quick convenient resolution. Low-effort scores align perfectly with these expectations. CES can also be teamed up with digital containment rates to really gauge effectiveness.
To keep customers coming back, intuitive design, accessible vocabulary, and clear wording are crucial. Get these wrong, and even with successful issue resolution, poor design will result in high effort.
Awkward-to-use touchpoints and difficulty escalating can have a ripple effect on agent-led interactions, driving up costs rather than reducing them. High-effort scores and soaring escalation levels should have decision makers diving into intent data, evaluating journey design and extracting insights from AI and agent interactions.
For new touchpoints, refining them in a continuous improvement cycle is the only way to maintain relevance and efficiency in dynamic conditions. CES should be a core KPI used in any panel for tracking performance.
With a name like customer effort score, it would be easy to assume that a high score equates to high effort, but this is far from true. For a single question survey there is an incredible amount of variation!
TIP: whatever the choice, make the wording as short and clear as possible, ideally the scoring scale should be so intuitive it doesn’t rely on the question to be used.
TIP: universal conventions and previous experience mean users anticipate negative options or opinions to appear on the left AND for numbers to appear in ascending order. This means largely, though not always, a high score equates with a high level of ease.
TIP: Always provide an optional comments box for customers to leave a reason for their choice, this can be a goldmine of actionable insights.
Regardless of intent or outcome it’s easy to consistently apply CES and gather representative results on self-service channels. It can even serve as an overarching post-interaction survey. However, while this approach is valid, it’s not necessarily the best tactic.
With several options available including CSAT and NPS, to prevent survey fatigue consider the situations in which using CES might offer the most actionable insights.
Remember CES surveys are most effective when conducted immediately after a self-service experience to capture sentiment as accurately as possible.
There are several ways to calculate a trackable KPI. Depending on how the survey was set up it’s essential to start by setting the ground rules for interpretation: does a high numerical score on the survey indicate high or low effort? This then dictates whether the goal becomes high and increasing values or low and decreasing values. Below are three of the most common ways to calculate CES but other variations do exist.
For this calculation, the result will lie somewhere on scale used by customer to rate their experience:
Total of all customer effort ratings ÷ Total number of responses
This second technique provides a score in the form of a percent, which is easier for external comparison where this is possible:
(Sum of all scores ÷ Maximum possible total score) x 100
“Overall, how easy was it to get the help you wanted today?” This variation developed because of the issues with traditional wording. It uses a seven-point scale and a calculation similar to the net promotor score. Results can lie anywhere on a scale of –100 to +100 where +100 occurs if all customers choose very or extremely easy
NetEasy score = % easy – % difficult
% easy = (The number of customers scoring very and extremely easy ÷ the total number of responses) x 100
% difficult = (The number of customers scoring fairly, very or extremely difficult ÷ the total number of responses) x 100
Neutral scores and those scoring only fairly easy are left out of the calculation.
Armed with CES data there are plenty of ways to dive deeper into the findings to generate actionable data.
Remember that optimizing the design, content, and functionality of self-service touchpoints isn’t really about CES. The goal is repeat users and customer loyalty, CES just signals when things are moving in the right direction. So, here’s a few ways to nurture repeat users by reducing customer effort:
Don’t forget to track CES after any change to assess the success of the changes.
Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solutions significantly reduce effort by integrating multiple channels into a single customer conversation. Whether switching between digital channels or moving to the voice channel, customers can blend automated and agent-led touchpoints without losing progress. This unified history also breaks down silos and enables more detailed analytics and more accurate AI-generated next-step suggestions for agents. Odigo’s CCaaS solution is an intuitive omnichannel interaction management platform. Equipped with AI and open to integration with 3rd party providers, the Odigo solution has intelligent features to support every user. Customers benefit from chatbots and automated touchpoints, agents have full visibility when channel swapping is necessary and supervisors can monitor, track and receive alerts on customized panels of metrics.
To find out more about providing the standard of service customers want and expect download the CCMA research Voice of the Contact Centre Consumer.
Hervé Leroux joined Odigo in 2014 as Chief Marketing Officer, responsible for raising brand awareness through an effective B2B strategy…
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