Poor customer experience (CX) is expensive. 52% of customers walk away from a bad CX. 31% would feel negatively about a brand if it doesn’t respond to messages “quickly.”
On the other hand, good CX is lucrative. Over half of the customers surveyed would pay more for good CX, finds Gartner. And customer experience drives two-thirds of customer loyalty, more than brand and price combined!
Clearly, creating a stellar customer experience is non-negotiable. A key part of that is reducing the effort a customer needs to put into having a business relationship with you.
In other words, how easy is it to buy from you? How many hoops does the customer have to jump through to get something done, such as making a purchase, resolving an issue, upgrading a service, etc.? Is each customer interaction with your brand truly effortless?
In this blog post, we explore customer effort score as a key metric in CX. We’ll explain how it works, how to calculate it, and how you can improve it in your organization.
How to Measure Customer Effort Score (CES)
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is Customer Effort Score (CES)?
Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much effort a customer puts into interacting with a company for their various needs. It measures the ease of customer’s relationship with your company over time.
CES offers a unique perspective into customer experience and complements existing metrics like customer satisfaction score, net promoter score (NPS), customer churn rate, etc. Optimizing CES is one of the biggest customer service challenges for nearly every organization.
How is CES measured?
The customer effort score is calculated based on a customer’s responses to a survey. The central question used in a CES survey is:
How do you rate your level of effort in buying this product? The answers are on a scale ranging from “very easy” to “very difficult.” This question may have minor variations based on the point in the customer journey at which you choose to measure CES. But we’ll discuss this in more detail later in this blog post.
When to measure customer effort?
Typically, organizations measure CES after critical processes in the customer journey. Here are some common interaction points where you can conduct CES surveys.
Post-purchase: After a customer completes a purchase, especially online, ask them how easy it was to find products, navigate the checkout process, and complete the transaction.
After onboarding: When a new user completes the account setup or onboarding process, ask them to rate the ease of the experience.
After using a new feature: When you roll out a new feature or service, collect CES feedback to understand how easy it is for customers to use and integrate it into their routine.
Post-product return or exchange: After a customer completes a return or exchange, ask them to rate how easy it was to navigate the process.
After an issue: After a customer’s complaint is resolved, it’s common practice to ask if they’re satisfied. In addition, check if it was easy to get it resolved, which will contribute to the CES score.
After a drop-off: If a customer spends some time on your website or mobile app, you can understand if CES contributed to the loss of sales with a survey.
Why is CES important?
There are dozens of situations in which a slight inconvenience for the customer could make them walk away without you ever identifying it as a reason. CES helps identify hidden opportunities to fix those caps in your CX strategy and, for this reason, offers extraordinary benefits in improving customer centricity.
Meaningful feedback
CES surveys help nearly every department with meaningful feedback. Good customer effort score surveys educate the entire organization significantly.
CES surveys can unlock a veritable treasure trove of insights for various departments within your organization:
- Site loading for too long? Inform the product team
- Too many steps to make a purchase? Inform the UX design team
- Wait time for support is too long? Speak to the customer support team
- Issues taking 3-4 interactions to be resolved? Get the learning and development team to help with training
Customer loyalty
Prospects who find interactions easy are more likely to return, increasing retention, long-term loyalty, and customer advocacy. In fact, 96% of customers—that’s almost everyone—who have to suffer through high-effort interactions become disloyal soon after!
Sales and customer lifetime value
When the effort to buy is low, customers buy more. But that’s not all. They also return to repurchase again and again, minimizing churn, reducing the need for continued customer acquisition, and increasing their lifetime value.
Positive word-of-mouth
Satisfied customers who experience low effort tend to recommend your business to others, driving organic growth.
Cost efficiency
By identifying and eliminating friction points, you can reduce the need for customer support and lower operational costs. Low-effort experiences reduce “40% of repeat calls, 50% of escalations, and 54% of channel switching,” estimates Gartner.
Employee experience
When customer effort is low, it means customers are most likely able to solve their needs themselves through self-service or AI-based channels. This not only means fewer calls to the contact center but also less frustration overall. As a result, your service reps have a better experience and higher job satisfaction.
To reap all of the above benefits and improve your CX, you need to measure the customer effort score accurately. Let’s look into that next.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Measure Customer Effort Score
The best way to measure CES is to ask customers a survey question and add up the responses they give. Each step here is critical, so watch closely. 👀
1. Draft the right question
After an interaction, you need to ask your customers to rate the ease of their experience. Draft the question in such a way that you focus on how easy it was—or how effortless—and not about satisfaction or promotability.
Some examples of effective CES survey questions include:
Post-purchase experience
- How would you rate the ease of making a purchase on the website?
- Was the checkout process simple?
Customer onboarding
- Were the onboarding instructions easy to follow?
- Did you find the registration process to be intuitive?
Product returns or warranty claims
- How easy was the return process?
- How simple was the warranty claims process?
2. Decide on the scale
Typically, the rating scale for CES surveys tends to be 1 to 5 or 1 to 7. So, if the question is “how would you rate the ease of making a purchase on our app?” The answers would be on a scale of very difficult, partially difficult, difficult, neutral, easy, partially easy, very easy, where 1 corresponds to ‘very difficult‘ and so on.
3. Set up the survey delivery mechanism
As the CES score is an average, the more responses you have, the better the data quality. So, it’s important to ensure you send it to the right people at the right time in the right format.
Use a customer success software that helps you streamline this process. ClickUp CRM offers a number of features that enable this. The most useful of them all are a bunch of powerful, customizable templates. Here are some examples.
Survey template
ClickUp’s Customer Satisfaction Survey template is a fantastic starting point for setting up your CES surveys.
This beginner-friendly template enables you to brainstorm questions, set up survey forms, send them to customers using ClickUp Automations, analyze results, and take action all in one place!
Feedback form template
Sometimes, it might be easier to send a form with multiple questions instead of sending dozens of emails, one at each step.
The ClickUp Feedback Form template is a great tool to consolidate your questions. As part of this form, you can also add open-ended questions, combining quantitative data with qualitative customer feedback for more meaningful insights.
Customer service template
You can also customize and adapt ClickUp’s Customer Service Management Template to include fields for customer effort. This integrates multiple customer service metrics into one dashboard for more contextual analysis.
Use the customizable views to track ongoing tasks, generate reports, and more.
4. Calculate the CES
For each time period, like a month or quarter, gather all the responses from customers who have participated in the survey. Add up all the individual CES ratings and calculate the weighted average. That is your CES.
Let’s take the example of 100 people’s responses to a CES survey question.
| Responses | No. of respondents |
|---|---|
| Very easy (5) | 40 |
| Somewhat easy (4) | 20 |
| Neutral (3) | 5 |
| Somewhat difficult (2) | 15 |
| Very difficult (1) | 20 |
Here, the weighted average across the 100 responses is 3.45, which is the CES. What does that mean? Is it a good score? Let’s see.
Summarize this article for me pleaseAnalyzing CES Data
Interpreting CES scores is pretty straightforward: neutral or above is better than negative. In the above example, the average is above the score for neutral (i.e., 3), so you’re in a good place.
However, just because you’re not in a negative zone doesn’t mean you’re doing well. There are various insights to be gleaned from the above data, such as:
- 60% of customers are having a low-effort experience
- 20% of customers are finding the process very difficult
- 40% of customers are neutral or negative (the same number who think it’s very easy)
Each of these presents unique insights for various departments, which we’ll explore next. But first, what is a good CES score?
What is a good customer effort score?
A good customer effort score depends on the scale used and how you frame questions. A common understanding is that on a 7-point scale, any score of 6 and above is good. If you’re using a 5-point scale, you must aspire for a score of 4 at least.
The above is just the standard customer effort score benchmark. If you’re just beginning to measure CES, set your own standards. Conduct an initial survey to benchmark your company’s current score against competitors or your own estimates and then seek to improve it.
How to gather insights from a CES survey?
The primary purpose of a CES survey is to identify painpoints in the customer journey and design ways to resolve them. Here are some examples of how you might interpret poor CES scores.
- After a support call, a high-effort service interaction might mean long wait times or multiple transfers across departments
- After a return process (which is already the result of bad or less-than-ideal product experience), poor CES might mean too many questions, suspiciousness from agents, delay in crediting returns, etc.
- After an onboarding process, poor CES is a predictor of customer engagement and loyalty
Remember that a score is just a number. The real reasons for the low score can be any number of things. To improve CES, you need a strategic approach that considers all the factors that contribute to an unsatisfactory customer experience. We’ve outlined a framework below.
Summarize this article for me pleaseStrategies to Improve CES
Before you make any adjustments to the process based on findings from the customer effort survey, you need to understand why. So, begin with a root-cause analysis.
Conduct a root-cause analysis
Study the process showing poor scores thoroughly. The simplest way is to replicate the experience of the user and observe the level of difficulty at each stage.
For example, let’s say your company’s returns process has poor CES scores. The customer service team, in collaboration with the UX team, needs to create a buyer account, buy a product and try to return it. Walking in the customer’s shoes helps identify the obstacles in their path.
Alternatively, you can also look at:
- Analytics: Observe the points in the process where people spend too long, exit the page, or contact support
- Observation: Set up a study of a sample of users and observe how they use your product
- Interviews: Schedule interviews with a sample of customers to understand their feelings and reactions
Once you’ve narrowed down the foundation of the problem and its root cause, get started on making changes.
Streamline processes
Map the customer journey and simplify customer interactions at every stage. ClickUp Mind Maps is a great way to visualize customer journeys collaboratively and identify blockers at every node.
You can streamline any process by making it:
- Intuitive with clear labels and easy-to-find information
- Straightforward with linear navigation and search
- Short with fewer steps to complete tasks, such as checkout, account setup, or returns
- Supported by video walkthroughs and chatbot support
Leverage technology
A good client relationship needn’t always be manual. Using technology effectively is one of the best client retention strategies.
Set up a robust CRM
Consolidate all interactions in one place with a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Go beyond their basic information. Integrate conversation history, feedback, surveys, and cross-sell/upsell opportunities into their profile to make it double up as a customer retention software tool.
If this is your first time, try out ClickUp’s CRM template. Capture customer information, segregate the data with Custom Fields, add potential revenue, and include comments all in one place.
Automate what you can
Save time for customer service agents by automating simple processes. Offer one-click resolutions to problems. For instance, automate the ‘forgot password’ workflow. Set up customer service templates for repeatability.
Use AI
Deploy AI tools for customer service like chatbots to handle common queries and issues. Create a conversational chatbot that can handle customer queries contextually. For instance, a chatbot can schedule appointments by collecting requirements, verifying availability, and creating an agenda automatically.
Build self-service portals
Let the customer help themselves. Create comprehensive self-service portals for customers to find answers to common questions, access account information, and resolve issues independently.
Build a comprehensive knowledge base. Include easy-to-use resources like videos, workbooks, etc. ClickUp Docs is a great way to document processes, connect related items, and share securely with customers.
What’s more? Your customers don’t even have to go through all the documents. ClickUp Brain will answer questions and summarize responses instantly.
Enhance support
Customer communication management is a key factor in CX. Improving multi-channel support can help improve customer effort scores. Enable customers to seek assistance through the platform they are most comfortable with, whether it is chat, email, or phone.
💡 Pro Tip: Make sure to collate customer data from all channels in a collaborative CRM so they don’t have to repeat themselves.
Summarize this article for me pleaseLower the Effort for You and Your Customers with ClickUp
The modern business environment is unique. Customers demand instant responses. Some want to buy directly on Instagram and TikTok without navigating to a brand app or website. They walk away from websites that take one second too long to load.
Even in B2B, managing client expectations has become extremely complex. Today’s customers refuse to spend a minute longer solving a problem than they need to. And why should they? When competitors are happy to comply with near-instantaneous resolutions!
Business leaders understand this too. From marketing heads to the corporate executive board, many executives closely track customer sentiment through social media and expect product teams to consistently improve CX. In such a world, your customer effort score is a critical metric.
Reducing CES contributes significantly to CX and, therefore, the bottom line. However, managing and executing a targeted CES survey is a complex task. It requires skills, strategies, analytical capabilities, and a robust CRM.
ClickUp for Customer Service is precisely that. It helps you manage client relationships, capture important data, track interaction history, manage tickets, conduct surveys, and more. Try ClickUp today for free!
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