Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that businesses and contact centers use to measure the effort required by a customer to resolve an issue, complete a task, or get assistance. CES is usually collected using surveys which help contact centers identify points of friction in the customer journey. Businesses and contact centers can then implement better workflows to reduce overall effort and improve customer experience.
Collecting and Measuring Customer Effort Score
Customer effort score is often collected at the end of an interaction either in chat, through an IVR, or by an agent. Lately, voice AI agents are also being used to automate feedback collection. The customer is offered a choice to pick numbers between 1 and 5 to share how much effort it took to resolve their query or issues. 1 being easy or seamless, and 5 being difficult or frustrating. Once the responses are collected, it’s very simple to calculate the total customer effort score. The lower, the better.
Customer Effort Score = Sum of Survey Responses / Total Number of Survey Responses
Why does CES matter in Contact Centers?
There are multiple metrics to track the effectiveness and success of a contact center. The customer effort score then, is another data point towards improving customer experience. CES in the contact center can be used for the following:
Improve Customer Retention: As you measure customer effort scores, and actively try to lower them, you are more likely to retain your customers. When customers feel that you’ve made it easy for them to get assistance, they will continue using your product. As a matter of fact, just by administering CES surveys, you show them that you care about what they think. This increases customer loyalty in the long run.
Identify Issues: A high CES score is a telltale sign of bottlenecks in your customer service process. Even if FCR rates are high, and and the customers are generally satisfied. A high CES means there is still room for improvement. Pursuing these process bottlenecks will allow you to find solutions and make the experience even better.
Improve Efficiency: CES scores combined with brief customer feedback can help you find friction points in your processes. Given that there is friction here, these high effort points are likely to use more time during call handling. Something that is directly contributing to call time. This impacts agent efficiency, which means your center is losing money by the minute. Removing these latency and friction points can immediately boost efficiency levels and bring down average handle time. This improves efficiency and agent productivity.
Best Practices for CES in Contact Centers
Deploying customer effort scores in your contact center processes is relatively straightforward. Here’s how to go about it.
- Use Surveys as an Auditing Tool: CES surveys don’t need to be used across all calls and interactions. Only the processes that are inefficient or need to be improved actively. This means processes that are not performing well across the board. Responding to a survey is also an effort on your customer’s part. So use CES surveys as an auditing tool for interactions that really matter, not as the default for all interactions.
- Keep Surveys Simple: Stick to collecting ratings, at the most a rating and an answer to an open-ended question. This respects the customer’s time and makes it more likely that they will answer your questions.
- Automate Feedback Collection: Use a CRM tool to trigger surveys after an interaction without using agent time. Use an AI IVR or AI voice to for feedback collection over phone calls. This will make feedback collection easy and cost-effective.
- Combine and Compare Metrics: Scores like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) for a better understanding of the customer experience.
- Act on Feedback: Surveys are used to identify and resolve high-effort areas within the customer service processes. Align your tech stack and scripts to resolve some of these issues. See if customer service automation is a viable path for your contact center. Train your customer service team on the product or service they represent. This way they are more adept at resolving customer issues.
- Track Trends Over Time: Track trends in CES over time to consistently make improvements to your processes. You need to know if the changes made have caused the amount of effort to reduce or not. If you are administering customer effort score surveys and making course corrections; you should see improvements in overall customer experience, thereby boosting NPS and CSAT as well.
The Bottom Line
Customer Effort Score (CES) is an added data point to measure customer effort during customer service interactions. As someone who manages or runs a contact center, this metric can be invaluable when gauging the level of customer effort required to resolve issues. If the effort is high, it generally means that the process is inefficient. An inefficient process impacts customer satisfaction and your bottom line by increasing handle time. You can then find points of friction in customer interactions and align your customer support team to iron some of these out. It’s important to remember that this metric should be used alongside other metrics to get a more holistic picture of customer experience.
