73% of customers choose experience over price and quality.
It means investing in customer service is equally crucial as in product quality and price. If you have been ignoring the role of customer service so far, it is time to think about customer experience, starting by tracking customer effort score.
Explore how to measure CES and what contact centers need for a better customer experience.
What is the Customer Effort Score?
Customer effort score (CES) is a critical customer experience metric that measures the ease of interaction between a customer and a business. A simple survey question: “On a scale of 1 to 10 (or very easy or very difficult), how easy was it to solve the issue?” is often quite enough to get a better understanding of customer experience.
Unlike other metrics such as the customer satisfaction score (CSAT), CES specifically evaluates how much effort customers must exert to have their issues resolved or complete a transaction. Introduced by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) in 2010, CES helps businesses identify friction points in customer interactions and optimize their services accordingly.
A high CES is a good CES with no established benchmark or standard. The “good” is good when compared to previous scores.
Why is Customer Effort Score (CES) Important?
If your service and your product make your customers feel overwhelmed and frustrated, it won’t take long before customers find a better solution among your competitors. Tracking CES can pinpoint all the gaps your product and service have without any complicated data monitoring and analytics. Just ask the customer and listen to the results. CES directly correlates with customer loyalty, retention, and overall satisfaction.
Businesses tracking CES can quickly discover areas for improvement, leading to higher customer retention rates. Moreover, if businesses are tracking contact center metrics, mainly CSAT and NPS, they won’t have complete data without CES.
All in all, CES helps.
Measure customer effort: When analyzing these contact center performance metrics, it will immediately show the effectiveness of customer service.
Predict customer behavior: A high score indicates customer dissatisfaction and frustration, where the next step is probably customer churn.
Identify pain points: CES not only indicates product pain points but also customer service issues.
How to Measure Customer Effort Score?
Measuring CES involves conducting surveys after customer interactions, asking customers to rate their experience on the ease or difficulty of completing their intended action.
The customer effort score formula:
There are two primary methods for measuring CES:
Open-ended CES survey formula
This qualitative approach involves asking customers open-ended questions like, "What could we do to make your experience easier?" or "Describe any difficulties you experienced during your interaction." Responses provide rich qualitative data but require significant time to analyze for actionable insights. However, in high-pressure environments, like telecommunications, finances, or healthcare, customers are not willing to spend extra effort and time on reviewing customer service. So this method may not be effective.
96% of customers who have high-effort experience are more likely to leave the brand even if they were satisfied with it previously.
Scaled CES survey formula
A more structured approach involves using numerical scales (typically a 1-7 scale), where customers rate their interaction from "Very Difficult" to "Very Easy." This method provides quantifiable data that can be easily tracked over time. Customers are asked to rate the customer service after the call or chat by simply choosing the number according to their experience.
In fact, customers may see several variations of scaled surveys:
The Likert scale - Strongly Disagree – Disagree – Somewhat Disagree – Undecided – Somewhat Agree – Agree – Strongly Agree.
The 1-10 scale, where each score has its explanation.
The 1-5 scale: Very Difficult – Difficult – Neither – Easy – Very Easy
Emotions face: simple but less informative than the rest.
Before implementing any of the methods, the CES metric should have a solid base to be tracked. What does it mean?
Step 1: Set objectives for the CES survey. The customer journey has many touchpoints, and each touchpoint has its objectives. By defining the objectives, businesses will be able to better understand when to send surveys and which model is the best fit.
Step 2: Ask customers the right questions. The more accurate the CES survey, the easier it is to analyze data and have a clear understanding of the customer experience.
Step 3: Send surveys at the right time. The delivery method and time depend on the specific interaction, but as a golden rule, the surveys are sent immediately after interaction through chat, email, or call. The key to an effective survey is to be short without requiring much effort from the customer.
Step 4: Analyze feedback and act accordingly. The survey’s role is to give you priceless information about customer experience. Knowing where your customers spent much effort and what made them feel frustrated will help you proactively address these issues.
Step 5: Optimize and improve. Once the data is analyzed, the final step before repeating the first step (because customer experience is an ongoing process) should be agents’ training and key interaction optimization.
What Is a Good Customer Effort Score?
A good CES typically ranges between 5 and 7 on a 7-point scale. A score of 6 or higher indicates low customer effort, suggesting customers find interactions easy and seamless. Businesses should regularly benchmark their CES KPIs against industry standards and track improvements over time. Lower scores indicate areas requiring urgent attention. However, depending on the industry, the numbers may be different. For example, in finances and banking, the numbers can be slightly lower due to specific topics.
How Customer Effort Score Matters Across Industries
The CES metric is implemented across diverse industries, each facing unique challenges:
Retail and e-commerce: CES is crucial for streamlining online purchases, improving user interfaces, and ensuring easy returns or customer support.
Healthcare: Reducing patient effort in appointment scheduling, accessing medical records, and billing improves patient satisfaction and adherence.
Hospitality and travel: Simplifying booking processes, check-ins, and complaint resolution leads to enhanced guest experiences.
Insurance and finance: Efficient claims processing, easy policy management, and personalized communication significantly lower customer frustration.
Government and Education: Easy access to information, simplified procedures, and responsive service channels directly impact public perception and compliance rates.
How to Improve Customer Effort Score?
To improve CES means minimizing friction in customer interactions and enhancing overall service efficiency. Here are strategic steps to improve your CES:
Personalize the customer experience
Personalization ensures customers feel valued and understood. Using customer history, preferences, and past interactions, businesses can create tailored solutions proactively.
Implement AI automation
AI in customer service is a definite must-have technology that can significantly reduce customer effort by automating repetitive tasks. AI copilots provide instant responses and can streamline customer interactions, improving efficiency. Other AI technologies to boost agent performance are also welcomed to make communication more productive. Such an AI solution is Hecttor’s real-time speed adjustment technology which reduces wait times and improves responsiveness. Quick resolutions directly lower customer effort scores.
Proactively address customer needs
Solving customer needs before they escalate into issues reduces customer effort dramatically. Proactive service includes notifying customers of updates, addressing potential problems early, and providing helpful suggestions.
Add channels to reduce average wait times
Adding new customer service channels, such as chatbots and social media support, helps customers contact you in the most comfortable way. Omnichannel support increases the chance of getting customers to fill out the survey.
Act on customer feedback
Again, don’t just gather data in a spreadsheet and let them live there forever. Using feedback to make changes demonstrates to customers that their input matters and enhances overall customer satisfaction.
Improving CES Score and Empowering Agents with Hecttor AI
Challenges from previous decades, such as long wait times and customers' fast, difficult-to-understand speech, are no longer bottlenecks for providing excellent customer service. Hecttor AI not only increases CES but helps optimize all the performance metrics and streamline contact center management through advanced, real-time speech speed adjustment technology. By slowing down fast-paced interactions in real time, Hecttor ensures clear understanding and reduces repeated customer queries. This directly impacts AHT, reduces FCR, and ensures higher CES scores.
Hecttor’s on-device application ensures maximum data privacy and security, complying fully with industry-leading SOC 2 standards.
Ready to see how Hecttor AI can help your contact center measure and improve CES effortlessly?
Book a demo today and experience the difference firsthand.