The Perks Of Measuring Client Effort Score
Are your customers satisfied with your services and products?
Most companies may find it out basing on the NPS survey or CSAT (customer satisfaction index). But do these indices really show what is your customers’ negative and positive experience, what needs to be improved and what are the main drivers of positive customer experience?
The Client Effort Score (CES) is a complex index that can let you know whether customers purchase your service or product again and whether they are willing to spend more.
According to Harvard Business Review, CES is a leading index that showed the predictive power of repurchasing and the power of increased spending with the highest accuracy, as compared to NPS and CSAT.
Moreover, besides the valuable prediction of repurchasing and increased spending (which can also be perceived as components of customer retention rate) you are able to detect the exact processes and phases of customer service with demands improvements.
Client effort score measurement
To start with, let’s define the question statement.
The statement depends on what exactly you would like to evaluate.
So, you can ask your customers
- “How easy it was to resolve the issue”,
- “How easy it was to get the answer for your question”, or
- “How much effort did you put to fulfill your request”.
The question statement can help you receive exact feedback regarding the specific process.
There is no certain model of how to measure this Key Performance Indicator and scale gradation.
Suggested scales: 1-5, 1-7, 1-10.
The scale should consider the range of answers “extremely easy / extremely difficult” or “little effort / much effort”.
There are two calculation approaches to calculate the score: the same as for the NPS index or average score. Just make sure of how you are going to make understanding the result easier, and what will give you a better understanding of how the overall picture looks like.
When to use the CES? Measure it for a specific process, touchpoint, channel of contact, type of product. If you narrow down the question to a specific process, your results will be more accurate.
What is the point of measuring CES?
The predictive power of CES is very strong. The customers who had reported a little effort, 94% expressed an intention to repurchase, and 88% said they would increase their spending. Conversely, 81% of customers who had experienced a hard time solving their requests or using a product, reported an intention to negatively speak about the company.
The feedback on the client effort score is a valuable base to start the root cause analysis of any issue you experience with the product/ service. If you are eager to know why NPS is low, sales volumes are decreasing or your product is unpopular — CES will help to find the answers.
By analyzing data of customers’ feedback, you will find the main pain points. Use Pareto rule to focus on those processes or product features improvements, that will help you to quickly increase the CES.
A good practice to correlate CES with other KPI’s.
In case if your CES is high and NPS is low, search for similar pain points. The core of the matter can be in support service you provide. So, the product is good and customers like it, but the reason for not recommending is the service that customers receive while using your product.
Thus, if you decide to launch a new or additional product, there is a high risk of facing a lack of demand.
It’s better to focus on what drives your score rather than on the numbers. Remember, a good Net Promoter Score or Customer Effort Score by itself is not a quantifiable growth metric. Your main goal should always involve caring about your customers by heeding their feedback and taking actions to improve their experience.
