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#22 Customer Effort Score - Should I Be Measuring It?

by Daphne Lopes on
 

Have you heard the term “Customer Effort Score”?

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy it is to use a product or service.  

While it's been around since 2010, it seems to be making a comeback in the CS circles. The question is, should you be measuring it? 

Let’s look at what the CES is designed to do, what it tells you and more importantly what it doesn't.   

💪🏻 The Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES is a survey asking a simple question to customers in order to identify how easy it was to resolve an issue.

The answer is in the format of a Likert scale (5 or 7 points), which helps you group customers into negative sentiment, neutral and positive sentiment.

Customer-Effort-Score-question

The intention is to send this survey to customers straight after crucial moments in their journey. For example:

  • After Purchase
  • After Onboarding
  • After a Support Ticket is closed

You want to get their answer while it's fresh in their minds. 

It's good to rephrase the question to make it process-specific. Eg. How easy did [your company] make it for you to buy their product?

You can look at individual processes, but you can also aggregate of all processes you measure and create a total weighted score on 'How easy it is to do business with us?'.

🙋🏻‍♀️ Should You Be Measuring CES?

Just like any other survey, it's important to understand:

  1. what you are trying to understand by measuring the CES
  2. what are the actions you can take from this data
  3. how it impacts the customer experience

When considering "what you are trying to understand", the CES can be really valuable to understand process friction. While a C-SAT is better at picking up the quality of your service. 

For example:

Someone might have to take many steps and wait a long time to have their support ticket resolved. However, the support rep could be amazing at communication, building the relationship and advocating for the customer with internal teams. In this case, C-Sat might be high while CES could be low. 

If you are trying to understand processes, measure CES, if you are trying to measure people, use C-Sat.

For "actions you can take from this data", the CES can be useful to help quantify some of the feedback you might already be receiving qualitatively and to gain buy-in from cross-functional leaders to invest in process improvement.

However without follow-up questions to gather "WHY", you won't be able to take meaningful action. That's why you want to add a follow-up question to capture the qualitative feedback.

And finally when thinking about "how it impacts the customer experience", you want to avoid death by 1000 surveys. When each customer-facing team decides when to survey and what to survey you end up spamming customers and lowering the response rate. 

That's why it's key to have a strategy for your survey points across the customer journey and align behind a few key metrics that matter.

👩🏻‍💻 What CES Doesn't Tell You

It's tempting to try and conflate a good CES score to the likelihood of renewal but beware of doing it without some serious correlation analysis to back you up. 

I've worked with companies that had low CES scores and were extremely hard to do business with but renewed customers at a high rate because the outcomes they delivered were meaningful enough, or because they had an extremely sticky product. 

Conversely, I have worked with companies that had incredible CES scores but had high churn rates, because they just weren't delivering important enough outcomes or their product wasn't differentiated enough and price was a key driver for retention.

While we should always strive to be easy to do business with, remember CES is an insight for us to act on, not the silver bullet to predict churn or growth.

And never-ever measure individuals using CES, it's not a metric designed to understand the service quality delivered. 

Summary 

CES can be a great way to find process friction and improve the customer journey. But it's not a substitute for other CX metrics such as C-Sat and NPS. And it's definitely not a sure correlation to retention.

When implementing keep in mind a few tips:

  1. Align the CES survey to critical steps in the customer journey, especially where processes require the customer to do a lot of work on their side.
  2. Make it actionable by asking detractors follow-up questions so you can hone into the issues.

 

That's it for today folks.

See you next week!

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