Customer Effort Score or CES is a simple metric that is designed to evaluate and measure the amount of effort a customer puts in during their engagement with any business. This effort can range from anything from a request, finding a product, purchasing a product, checking in, checking out, exploring, and other parts of a customer journey.
The purpose of a CES is to determine how much effort does a customer has to put in to complete their engagement with a business. The customer, post their engagement, is asked to provide a rating from 1 to 5 in a simple survey that asks the question in the range of “how difficult your engagement with the business?”
The Role of Customer Effort Score
To calculate this valuable metric, customer experience software is used. It has become a crucial step for businesses to employ a good functioning customer experience software to push their boundaries in improving customer experience and customer satisfaction. Customer Effort Score is a very good metric that helps businesses in evaluating many important aspects of customers like their loyalty, their retention possibilities, their overall satisfaction with their engagement and much more. Hence, the employment of a CES software is imperative to capture customer-centric data, and building upon it to improve your customer experience.
Importance of Measuring Customer Effort Score
A customer’s expectations are straight forward. They want the service they were looking for, and while engaging, they want their issues to be resolved as quickly as possible. Here are the major reasons how CES helps businesses.
- Limiting Bad Word of Mouth: Through a CES software, you can conduct simple surveys to identify any bad customer experiences immediately. This helps the management in proactive reputation management and resolve those issues quickly. This takes away the bad taste in the mouth of the customers, and negative reviews are limited to the minimum.
- Improving Customer Service: Customer service is one of the most complained areas by customers for businesses. Employing CES software helps in detecting any discrepancies in the customer service department immediately. The Customer Effort Score surveys can also reveal in which departments more training or new strategies can be implemented to fasten up the process for the customers.
- Elevating User Experience: User experience is applicable for online businesses and a key factor in determining if the customers were satisfied with their engagement or not. If their engagement is taking too long, the customers will just open another website and complete their engagement there instead. Using CES surveys, you can avoid these customers slipping through your grasp, and complete their engagement.
How to Build an Effective Customer Effort Score Survey?
Customer Effort Score surveys are imperative at every touch-point of the customers’ journey with your business. Hence, building a CES survey that caters to the needs of the management to gain simple and valuable customer insights is important. Here’s how you can build a perfect survey for your customer experience software.
- Keeping them Simple and Precise: The CES surveys should be a maximum of two questions, and they should be as crisp, easy to understand, and vivid as possible. The first question should always be in the range of “How easy was your engagement with the said area”, and if needed the other questions should be “Why did you rate it this much”. No leading questions should be present in a CES survey.
- Automation is Convenient: CES surveys should be automatically sent out to the customers at every touch point, This can be achieved through a customer experience app that keeps track of a customer’s journey, and provides them with the survey after their engagement at touch-point ends.
- Optimization: Making sure that your surveys are optimized for multiple platforms and multiple devices are critical. More than 50% of online interaction occurs on mobile phones, which makes it important that the surveys are compatible to be taken on mobile phones.
Conclusion
The value of knowing how much effort a customer puts in to engage with your business is very high. Lower the efforts, the higher the chances of the customer becoming loyal. In today’s landscape of unscathed competition between brands, only the brands that have a better customer experience rise to the top. piHappiness provides customer-centric solutions through its CES software that helps to elevate your standards in the treatment and handling of your customers. Contact our professionals and start working towards improving your customer experience.
