By Estela Viñarás, on 18 July 2024
The Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that analyzes the level of effort customers experience when interacting with a brand. It is another way to measure customer satisfaction, taking into account aspects such as ease of using the company's products or services, the efficiency of customer service in resolving inquiries, and website usability, among other factors.
This article explains when and why analyzing the Customer Effort Score is beneficial and how to calculate it. If you want to know whether your consumers are content or not, and why, in order to improve your marketing, sales, and products or services, this article is for you!
Why Measuring Customer Effort Score Is Important
Measuring customer satisfaction is crucial for a company as it helps identify aspects of the customer journey that can be improved to increase loyalty and conversion rates. It also highlights what is being done well so that those practices can be sustained.
Among the various metrics available to measure customer satisfaction—such as CSAT, NPS, retention rate, churn rate—the Customer Effort Score stands out because it focuses on an aspect consumers highly value when trusting a brand: the ease of interaction.
Ultimately, a company's mission is to make customers' lives easier by solving their problems. Therefore, if a brand makes things difficult (e.g., with an unintuitive website, poor customer service, or difficult-to-use products), it fails to fulfill its mission.
That's why measuring the customer effort score is so significant and useful for improvement.
How to Calculate CES
One of the best ways to measure CES is by sending surveys to customers. Ideally, these surveys should be sent immediately after a purchase or after an interaction with the customer service team.
In these surveys, questions like the following can be asked:
- How easy was it to contact our customer service team?
- Did you find it difficult to resolve the issue?
- Was it easy to navigate our website and complete your purchase?
- Did you face challenges in using the product?
The choice of questions depends on the area of the company being analyzed.
To answer these questions, it's common to offer customers a numerical scale where 1 is very easy and 10 is very difficult (though the scale size may vary). It's also common to use happy or sad emoticons for customers to indicate their feelings.
Source: blog.hubspot.com
Source: blog.hubspot.com
Finally, to calculate CES, sum up the scores of all responses and divide by the total number of respondents.
If emoticons were used, you should have assigned a number to each emoticon beforehand to facilitate calculation.
As you can imagine, there's no universal result indicating whether a CES is good or bad, as it depends on how each company organizes its scale. For example, if your numerical scale ranges from 1 to 10, where 1 is very easy and 10 is very difficult, any result below 5 would generally be a positive sign.
Difference Between NPS and CES
While CES analyzes how easily customers interact with the brand, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the likelihood of customers recommending the brand. In essence, NPS is another way to measure customer satisfaction, but with a focus on a different aspect.
