Customer Effort Score. Use it to improve loyalty to your brand

The customer effort score helps you improve customer experience by making it easier, faster and more intuitive. It is also a very simple metric to calculate, can be easily understood by all departments that influence the customer experience and is complementary to other CX metrics such as the NPS or the CSAT score. Today we discover all its benefits and how it is calculated.

What is the customer effort score?

The customer effort score (CES) or customer effort indicator is a metric that measures the effort a customer must make to interact with a company, whether it is to solve a problem, obtain support or complete a transaction. The central idea behind the customer effort score is that the easier it is for customers to interact with a brand, the more satisfied they will be, and therefore the more likely they are to continue to buy from it. In fact, it is not necessary to provide excellent service that ‘delights’ customers. Service that goes beyond what is expected produces only marginal gains in loyalty. Therefore, it is enough to be effective and not to fail, because failure does have a major impact on customer defection.

This asymmetry and the impact of the customer effort score and its relationship to customer satisfaction is described in an article published in the Harvard Business Review entitled ‘Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers’. The authors provide data to support this argument:

• 94% of customers who reported having low-effort experiences said they were more likely to make repeat purchases.
• 88% of customers with low-effort experiences said they were more likely to increase their spending with the company.
• In contrast, 81% of customers who experienced high effort said they were more likely to speak negatively about the company.

The study concludes that minimising customer effort is more effective than trying to ‘delight’ customers, and that brands should focus on making interactions as simple and easy as possible.

Benefits of customer effort score

Implementing customer effort scoring helps you in several areas:

• Improve customer retention and prevent churn. As mentioned above, the customer effort score focuses on what really matters to customers: the ease of the experience. If the interaction is easy, customers will continue to buy and recommend a brand. If a customer perceives that a lot of effort is required to solve a problem, they are more likely to look for other options and stop being a customer.
• Identify areas of friction to improve. If many people tell you that they had to work hard to complete an assignment, you need to improve it. This allows you to get right to the areas of the service or product that create the most friction with customers.
• Improve efficiency and reduce costs. Companies that succeed in reducing customer effort tend to increase their efficiency. If customers can easily resolve problems, the volume of customer service calls, complaints, or repeat interactions will be reduced. This will lower costs and improve the overall perception of service.

Customer Effort Score: How is it calculated?

The Customer Effort Score is calculated through satisfaction surveys that measure the level of effort perceived by customers in a specific interaction with the company, such as resolving a problem or completing a transaction. The formula for calculating it is simple, as it is based on customer responses to a single question. Let’s look at the basic steps:

• Conduct a survey: After an interaction with the company (purchase, customer service, etc.), the customer is asked a single question, similar to the following: ‘How easy was it for you to solve your problem today? A Likert scale is provided as response options, usually with scores from 1 to 7 (although some companies use a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10), where 1 means ‘very difficult’ and 7 means ‘very easy’.
• Calculating the average: the customer effort score formula is as follows:

• Rating the results. This calculation will give an average score that can be from 1 to 7, or according to the scale used.
  • High scores (6 or 7): Indicate that clients feel it was very easy to complete the task.
  • Medium scores (4 or 5): Reflect a neutral experience, neither too difficult nor too easy.
  • Low scores (1 to 3): Indicate that customers experienced difficulties or friction in the interaction.

Example of customer effort score calculation:

Suppose that after a customer service interaction, you send surveys to 10 customers.

• Results obtained on a scale of 1 to 7: 6, 5, 7, 4, 6, 5, 5, 7, 6, 6, 6, 4
• Sum of scores: 6+5+7+4+6+6+5+5+7+6+6+6+4=56
• Total number of answers: 10 answers

The average customer effort score is 5.6 on a scale of 1 to 7, indicating that, in general, customers found it relatively easy to complete their task or solve their problem.

Calculate your customer effort score with We are testers

You can design your surveys to calculate your customer effort score with the We are testers research platform. You can choose between different likert scales with numbers, degrees of ease or with smiley faces expressing the degree of ease of the task you give them. Remember that you can use your own sample to do the survey, or if you prefer, we can provide you with consumers or users with the characteristics you want them to have. Through the consumer panel of 130,000 individuals we can identify your customers and your competitors’ customers, so you can assess the degree of effort of different brands and find out where you have an opportunity to improve against them. And if you need help putting it all together, we have a team of research experts to help you with everything you need.

Contact our experts now to find out more.