As Microsoft puts it, 96% of our consumers throughout the globe state customer service is one important factor while choosing their brands and remaining loyal. Whereas 68% of the customers opine the key to wonderful customer service is a customer service representative who is polite, 62% feel that service knowledge and insight is the key towards great customer service experience. Thanks to the modern technology, there are customer effort score apps available that could make the task easy for them.
Great quality of customer service has become an essential element to deliver excellent customer experience. The trend has taken up so high that 86% of the buyers remain willing towards paying more if their brand enables quick and easy shopping experience. So, the point is – how do brands realize unique customer expectations? How could brands make excellent service standards to bag customer loyalty. Through CES software aided surveys towards measuring customer effort.
Customer Effort Score
Customer effort score is amongst the most crucial metrics of customer service that measures the effort customers place into accomplishing a particular goal with a brand. It measures how convenient the customers are in conducting business with any brand.
To evaluate customer effort score, you could use the CES surveys that are generally sent after the interactions in customer service. It would ask the customer to rate the customer service along with the efforts from the associates or receiving solution to an issue on a scale between 1 and 10. You could always add one follow-up question that’s open-ended to understand the reasons behind customers’ score.
Why bother about Customer Effort Score?
Different processes or departments in any organization/business can use Customer Effort Score along with Customer reviews to the customer effort score data could help the brands in several ways, like:
Lesser amount of Negative Word of Mouth
A normal customer informs people when they have had a poor experience in customer service. Higher customer effort in conducting business with the brands not just influences their decisions on repurchases but also spreads the bad word of mouth publicity against the brands. Hence, you could use the customer effort score data towards understanding your present customer service conduct and make it better on the basis of open-ended answers and comments in your feedback survey. Using CES tools helps in identifying issues to allow proactive management such that you don’t end up with negative reviews on all your online circles.
Reduced cost of Customer Service
Since the CES surveys enable customers to share whatever went wrong, brands are able to find out what are the problem areas that generally surface on their service experiences. This enables in identifying the hiccups that could lead towards creating newer tickets also resolving various issues in a proactive manner. This would the load on customer service members enabling a cost-effective process. CES data also tells you in case certain training or improvement in the process is needed. This could dramatically help in speeding up the customer communications and resolutions, enabling the members of customer service to perform rather efficiently, hence increasing your overall business’ productivity.
Self-service that comes optimized
89% of the consumers wish companies should possess support portal that is self-service. Most of the time, customers would prefer doing everything by themselves before they would reach out to the brands seeking support. This is why brands make it easy to choose self-service so that customers can clearly stand apart. Hence, using customer experience score CES apps to survey and evaluate the features of self-service while onboarding, buying, troubleshooting, and so on, can help in identifying issues that could be affecting the performance of the self-service channels. For example, in case of any kind of availability of certain information, your customers could support the same also you could use the feedback towards fixing the issues.
Better User Experience
89% of your consumers have switched over from doing business with competitor because of poor customer experience. Customers no more mind shelling extra where brands can make in doing business with them much easier. So, even though you provide competitive prices along with a huge series of product range, you would fail at offering customer loyalty if you couldn’t ensure outstanding standards of customer service.
With the aid of your customer effort score, you could proactively reach out to your customers after each interaction or your support communication so that issues can be identified and resolved. It will also communicate the focus of your brand delivering seamless customer service.
Better Customer Loyalty
In around 2010, students and researchers from some reputed institute found that by reducing the amount of effort of a customer in resolving his/her problems gives higher indication of customer loyalty. Also, brands aren’t in a position to possibly bring down customer effort if they don’t have CES and can identify the major service issues. The CES provides an insight into where the business stands at the moment and helps in drafting a path of excellent customer service that works at tandem with customer expectations hence bring up the customer loyalty. Customer effort score apps or CES apps are these days the best tools to help you in this matter.
Best Practices of Measuring CES
While you send CES surveys, certain things that you need reminding yourself regularly are:
Use Surveys with Email Signatures: Email Signature surveys help in measuring agent performance plus capture feedback for each support-based interaction.
Use Surveys that are Email Embedded: These surveys are generally used to receive feedback post-resolution. It allows your customers to share their feedback right in the inboxes.
Open-ended questions are better options: Open-ended questions enable customers towards sharing their service challenges in their own terminologies, enabling the brands to locate exactly what is leading towards extreme customer effort.
Seek follow-up questions: Follow-up questions are vital towards checking how qualitative and swift the resolutions are and in closing of the feedback loop.
To Summarise
Acquire excellent standards of customer service needs not mere measurement of CES but also improving the same continuously. Taking help of some of the prominent brands that enable usage of CES software could be the best solution at this juncture.
