Why and When to Use Customer Effort Score (CES)

One of the reasons that Fred Reichheld came up with the Net Promoter System (NPS) is the fact that Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) isn’t a good predictor of customer loyalty. And he was right: multiple studies demonstrate that willingness to recommend correlates well with loyalty.

NPS is a valid measure for experiences relating to product quality, pricing, purchase channels or the way a brand makes us feel. But when it comes to customer support experience, NPS isn’t the best possible KPI: according to a study Customer Effort Score (CES) correlates better with a predictive power to repurchase or increase spending.

CES is measured by asking a single question: “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?” It is scored on a scale from 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort)

CUSTOMER SUPPORT SHOULD BE A LOW-EFFORT EXPERIENCE

Even if we hear a lot of talk about exceeding customer expectations, the customer support experience is more often negative. And the biggest dissatisfaction comes from how much effort does the customer have to exert in order to get the issue resolved. Therefore rather than focus on exceeding customer expectations, customer service interaction design should focus on low-effort service experience.

CUSTOMER INTERACTION ANALYSIS SHOULD REVEAL THE REASONS

Customer interaction analysis should reveal the reasons that cause customers to contact a company multiple times and detect the discontinuity steps in the support or service process that are creating customer dissatisfaction. Then the service design team should plan an improved process and implement it.

A MUST READ FOR CONTACT CENTER PROFESSIONALS

If you are a customer service professional, you are most likely already familiar with CES but if not please read an excellent article in Harvard Business Review. It is quite a few years old but still very relevant. Here is a link to the article.