Customer Effort Score, explained
“The customer's perception is your reality.” - Kate Zabriskie
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What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?
Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the amount of effort a customer has to expend to get what they need from your company—whether that’s resolving an issue, finding an answer to a question, or completing a specific action. The ultimate goal of CES is to provide customers with a low-effort experience.
Companies determine their CES through surveys that typically ask buyers to rate the ease of their interaction on a scale of “very easy” to “very difficult.” A high CES indicates low customer effort or mostly easy interactions. A low CES score indicates high customer effort and, most likely, a lot of unhappy customers.
History of Customer Effort Score
In 2010, researchers from CEB found that reducing the amount of effort a customer has to do to get their problem solved is a higher indicator of customer loyalty than delight. By acting on this insight and removing obstacles for the customer, they found companies can reduce customer service costs and attrition rates.
CEB found that indicators of high effort activities include customers switching channels to get their problem resolved, repeating information, generic service, and getting transferred to a different agent. According to the research published in the book, the Effortless Experience, “96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience. Disloyal customers are likely to cost the company more — they spread negative word of mouth and cease future purchases.”
Why Customer Effort Score Matters
As a company, you want your customers to experience low effort and ease when interacting with your product. A low CES is a strong indicator that a customer will stay with or purchase again from a company. Additionally, a low CES can also translate to positive organic media or word-of-mouth traffic. While a high effort score can lead to customers churning and even bad-mouthing your company.
Examples of high-effort situations for customers typically consist of having to be transferred to multiple departments, switching modes of communication (email to phone), or having difficulty with a company’s online interface.
Your Customer Effort Scores relay key data and insight into specific bottlenecks or difficulties that your customers face when interacting with your company. These negative experiences can then be fixed and mitigated by better training your customer support teams
Advantages The strongest endorsement for measuring CES is that it has high predictive power for customer loyalty. According to a Harvard Business Review (HBR) study, 94% of customers who reported they experienced low-effort interactions with a company said they would repurchase. While 88% of the same consumers stated they would increase their spending.
Disadvantages One negative or limitation to CES is that you can’t take into account or measure how consumers’ ratings or opinions of a brand are influenced by external factors such as competitors, pricing, or other products.
What Is The CES Calculation?
Once you receive the CES survey results, it’s time to calculate your Customer Effort Score. If you sent a 10-point scale or a Likert scale survey, use this CES formula to find your score:
CES Formula
Sum of CES scores ÷ Number of survey responses = CES
If you’re using an agree/disagree scale, subtract the percentage of negative responses from the percentage of positive responses to determine your CES.
Percentage of positive responses - Percentage of negative responses = CES
If you’re using an emoticon/emoji scale, you’ll also subtract the percentage of negative responses from the percentage of positive responses to calculate your CES. (Ignore neutral answers.)
Percentage of positive responses - Percentage of negative responses = CES
Say you send out a survey, and 300 respondents complete it. Of these responses, 250 of them are positive, and 50 are negative. First, you’ll determine the percentages of each type of response:
[(250 ÷ 300) x 100 ] x 100 = 83.33% positive
[(50 ÷ 300) x 100] x 100 = 16.66% negative
Now, find your CES by subtracting the negative percentage from the positive percentage:
83.33 - 16.66 = 66.67
The higher the CES, the easier it is for your customers to get what they want and need from your company. When the customer experience is effortless, buyers are more likely to stick around. So, a good Customer Effort Score can help reduce churn, too.
When to use Customer Effort Score surveys
There are three scenarios in which it’s particularly beneficial for teams to calculate and track CES scores:
Directly after a customer’s interaction with your support team. This will allow you to assess whether agents are making it easy for customers to solve their problems.
To supplement your product team’s user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) testing. CES will provide this team with feedback about how simple it is for customers to navigate your product.
When a customer interaction (e.g., downloading a white paper) leads directly to a purchase or subscription.
Regularly sending CES surveys will allow you to identify difficult aspects of the customer experience that should be improved.
CES Survey Types
There are several ways to conduct customer satisfaction surveys. All of them are getting to the same point though: On average, how much effort do customers put forth to complete a particular action. The below surveys should be implemented depending on the experience the customer went through.
The Likert scale can be used to measure satisfaction, agreement, desirability, and frequency. For instance, you might measure frequency by asking how often a client uses your software (Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, Frequently). Generally, the Likert scale uses a 7-point scale.
The 1–5 scale is a form of the Likert scale. For some surveys, you might want fewer answer choices due to there not needing to be as much variation, i.e. dropping the scale from seven to five.
The 1–10 scale easily translates your raw data to a CES score because of its focus on a numeric rating. Be mindful of how numbers are associated with negative and positive responses though. For example, typically higher numbers (8, 9, and 10) are associated with positive responses. However, if you’re asking the surveyee to rate the level of effort it took to resolve a problem you want your lowest numbers (1, 2, and 3) to be associated with low effort and your higher numbers to equate with high effort.
The three emotional faces scale survey is quite short because it only gives three options. This type of survey can be used frequently due to its brevity. It can also be used as a supplemental survey to one of the surveys listed above.
What Is a Good Customer Effort Score?
The answer is a bit tricky – mostly because performing a Customer Effort Score benchmark against competitors is difficult since there is no clear industry-wide standard to compare against, and also because whether or not your CES score is a good one depends on your Customer Effort Score question and the metrics you use.
After all, if you use the Disagree/Agree scale for answers, where “Strongly Disagree” is numbered with 1 and “Strongly Agree” is numbered with 7, and have a statement like “The company made it easy for me to solve my problem,” you’ll clearly want to have a high CES score – ideally one that’s over 5/50.
On the other hand, if your CES survey response scale associates 1/Happy Face metrics with “Less Effort” and 10/Unhappy Face metrics with “A Lot of Effort,” and directly ask customers how much effort they had to put into performing a certain action, you should strive to have a low CES score.
As in the case of other customer satisfaction scores, in order to get a grasp of where you stand, you should compare the CES with your score over a specific period of time, to see if your efforts are paying off. If you are experiencing an increase, it means you are on the right track, otherwise you should dig deep into customer feedback to see what you are missing.
Tips for building CES Surveys
CES surveys should be deployed immediately after interactions or specific touchpoints like a product purchase or an interaction with customer service. When a customer interacts with your company, simply asking them how easy it was to get their issue resolved can indicate if they’ll return as a customer. To take the survey one step further, you could ask why they rated the interaction easy or difficult so you know how to improve or close the loop on the interaction.
What to think about when building CES surveys:
Optimise for Mobile– More than 50 percent of online interaction occur on mobile devices, so your survey must be optimized for mobile. Remove any additional content like logos, unnecessary text, and external links and put the positive options at the top and the negative options at the bottom.
Automated Triggers– Surveys should be automatically sent out after an interaction with a customer service representative or specific touchpoint. Using software like Qualtrics can create automatic triggers so you don’t need to manually send out the survey.
Keep it Simple– The survey should only be one or two questions and you should avoid using any leading questions.
Share Your Data– Results should be shared with those who can take action and leadership across multiple departments should collaborate to implement a strategy. Additionally, customer service representatives should be empowered to follow-up with the customer and resolve any issues that weren’t solved in the original interaction.
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