The Big Deal With Your Customer Effort Score
While interacting with your brand, customers put in efforts.
These efforts might not be visible at first but must be recognized to enhance the customer experience.
And to acknowledge customer efforts, it is required to know the SAP Customer Effort Score of your brand.
CES is also important to know the ease of customer journey with your brand.
According to Wootric, higher CES results in about 96% of customer churn. Thus, analyzing the Customer Effort Score highlights the reasons for lower customer loyalty.
It is, therefore, necessary to know what CES is, why it is important, how to calculate it, and the customer effort score formula, scale, and benchmark.
What is meant by Customer Effort Score?
Customer Effort Score or CES is an easy tool to track customer loyalty over time.
CES is in the form of a customer experience survey used to score the ease with which a customer can interact with your organization.
This survey originated from research by the Corporate Executive Board and was first recorded in the book called The Effortless Experience.
The research concluded that a higher SAP Customer Effort Score implies lower customer loyalty, while a lower CES is the equivalent of a painless CX and thereby greater loyalty.
However, CES is different from NPS. Let’s understand customer effort score vs NPS in greater detail.
Customer Effort Score vs NPS: The Difference
While CES and NPS both are well-known and reliable customer surveys, the two are not the same.
The Net Promoter Score is a metric to measure the likelihood of customers to recommend your brand to others. While CES is a means to measure how much effort does it require on the customer end to engage with your brand during purchase or after-sales.
Here’s a table to help you understand Customer Effort Score vs NPS better:
Now that we have an understanding of the customer effort score vs Net Promoter Score (NPS) dilemma, let’s learn more about why is customer effort score important?
Why is Customer Effort Score Important?
When a customer interacts with your brand, they have to exert efforts to file a request, ask queries, get an issue resolved, purchase the product, and even return it.
The CES captures the extent of these efforts giving an idea of the ease with which a customer journey can be completed. If calculated and analyzed properly, CES can give valuable insights into customer loyalty.
Here are some reasons highlighting why is customer effort score important to brands:
- Repurchase: Understanding CES helps to understand whether the purchase process encourages customers to repurchase or leaves them too tired to even think about it.
According to statistics from CEB Global, an effortless Customer Experience can result in repurchase by 94% of customers. - Greater business: Repurchase also implies that customers return to spend more with your brand. This expands your business. According to Wootric, 88% of customers are willing to spend more if they experience an effortless customer journey.
- Positive word of mouth: Lower efforts are a great source of positive customer review. According to Forbes, an average of 16 people tell others about a negative experience due to higher CES. Thus, maintaining lower CES can be a source of positive word of mouth.
- Lower customer churn: According to Gartner, lower CES increases customer loyalty by 22%. This means if customers are exposed to lower efforts, it can reduce customer churn drastically.
- Better metric: CES is a better metric than any other customer survey. It represents customer loyalty 1.8 times better than other customer satisfaction scores, according to Challenger.
So let’s dive in to learn more about the sap customer effort score formula and scale, and the customer effort score industry benchmark.
How to Calculate CES?
CES can be recorded best by creating a survey and getting the customers to rate their experience on a customer effort score scale for the ease of interaction with the brand.
The customer effort score scale is based on a Likert scale to measure customer’s ease of effort on 3, 5, 7, or 11 pointers.
So when is the right time for a CES survey, what is the customer effort score formula and the industry benchmark of CES? Let’s answer each question one by one.
Best time to take a CES survey
The most appropriate time for a CES survey would be immediately after a customer interaction takes place. For instance, after
- a customer has purchased a product
- a customer has interacted with a representative for query redressal
- the customer has returned a product or availed a refund
Thus, it would be appropriate to ask the customer effort score questions for each touchpoint, immediately after it occurs.
The Customer Effort Score Scale
For recording the customer’s opinion on how easy it was to interact with the brand, the following 5-pointer Customer Effort Score scale can be used:
1- Very Low Effort
2- Low Effort
3- Neutral
4- High Effort
5- Very High Effort
You can also create your own CES scales keeping an equal number of positive and negative pointers and a neutral pointer in between. The CES scale always has an odd number of pointers.
The Customer Effort Score Formula
Once the customers’ responses are recorded on these scales for all the customer effort score questions, the ratings are quantified.
For a very low effort, 1 is given as a score and for a very high effort, 5 is the score.
The total of all such scores, across all questions for all customers, is added and the sum is divided by the total number of respondents to derive the CES.
For instance, 10 customers rate the ease of query redressal by XYZ brand as follows on a 5-point scale:
1, 4, 3, 2, 1, 3, 5, 1, 2, 2
Then the customer effort score formula will be:
Sum of all CES / total number of respondents
CES = 1+4+3+2+1+3+5+1+2+2 / 10 = 24/10 = 2.4
Customer Effort Score Industry Benchmark
On a 5-point scale, the customer effort score industry benchmark is less than 3.
The experience with a score of less than 3 is found to increase customer loyalty by up to 22% while a CES of more than 3 results in a mere 2% increase.
Conclusion
CES is an easy yet effective means of understanding CX. An effortless journey will always lead to repeat purchases and enhance loyalty. While recording CES, also try to probe the reasons for the ratings. It’ll help improve your future performance.
