When to Use Customer Effort Score?

What is the Customer Effort Score?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a customer service metric that measures the levels of effort your customers have to put into a certain interaction with you to achieve their goals. CES is calculated by asking a simple question “To what extent do you agree with the following statement: The company made it easy for me to handle my issue?”

Customers usually provided with the scale ranges from 1-7 to rate their effort experience:

1 = Strongly Disagree

2 = Disagree

3 = Somewhat Disagree

4 = Undecided

5 = Somewhat Agree

6 = Agree

7 = Strongly Agree

This is also known as CES 2.0. Here in this scale range, a 1-3 segment (Strongly Disagree to Somewhat Disagree) will be associated with negative results, whereas the 5-7 segment (Somewhat Agree to Strongly Agree) represents positive results.

When to Use Customer Effort Score?

Customer Effort Score (CES) metric provides meaningful insights into customers' efforts at any stage of the customer journey. There are various customer touchpoints where you can use Customer Effort Score metric to improve their experience. Explore 3 crucial use cases of Customer Effort Score metric:

3 Use Cases of Customer Effort Score

To measure the overall experience with the brand
After interaction with Customer Service
After interaction with a product that led to a purchase or subscription

1. To measure the Overall Experience with the Brand

Besides measuring the discrete level of user experience, the Customer Effort Score metric enables you to gauge the overall customer loyalty for the brand. CES can be used among both customer success teams and product teams to improve the effort experience of the customers.

Many business entrepreneurs have stated that the CES metric is more superior to the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric to identify the moments where customers begin to feel frustrated and lost. They feel that asking the fluid question -"How likely are you to recommend [company] to a friend?" (the NPS question, that is) is not useful at this stage.

But both the Customer Satisfaction metrics (CES & NPS) have their own significance when it comes to improving customer experience. NPS is more useful to segment customers into different categories, whereas CES helps you to identify and resolve the real bottlenecks in the customer experience itself. Be it CES or NPS Score, both the metrics focus on creating an "effortless experience," which tends to affect the overall customers’ experience.

2. After Interaction With Customer Service

Since the inception of the Customer Effort Score, “when to send CES Survey” is the biggest point of concern. Most of the companies send a CES survey at any regular time.

When to send CES Survey? As you all know, the CES metric is being employed to ask customers to specifically rate their level of effort they’ve put into getting a problem or issue resolved. Always send a CES Survey to the customers immediately after a customer service touch points like post email support ticket has been resolved.

3. Post interaction with a product that led to a purchase or subscription

This is the most common use case for CES surveys when customers intended to purchase your product or subscribe to your service. This action will not only help to improve your customer experience but also create a positive impact on your customers’ minds.

For instance, you can send the CES survey once your customer signs up for a free trial or finishes the on-boarding period. This will lead to low-effort experience and help you to quantify customer experience and increase loyal customers.