Customer Engagement/Effort Score (CES) is a key performance indicator (KPI) in customer experience and service.
CES quantifies how effortlessly customers can engage with a company, whether it’s making a purchase, searching for a product, or seeking resolution to an issue. Lower effort indicates a more streamlined and positive experience, which can correlate to higher customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Customer Engagement/Effort Score (CES) quantifies the effort it takes for customers to engage with a company or brand, indicating the ease or difficulty of their interactions.
- Calculation: CES is calculated by summing the scores provided by respondents and dividing by the total number of respondents.
- Strategic Importance: CES is important to organizations because it helps cultivate loyalty, identify areas of high effort, improve operational efficiency, enhance the customer experience, and reduce churn.
- Optimization Strategies: To improve CES, companies can streamline processes, offer multichannel support, solicit regular feedback, and train customer service teams. Personalizing the shopping experience also plays a critical role.
- Limitations: CES has limitations, such as being limited to specific interactions, being sensitive to external factors, not differentiating between types of efforts, not measuring emotional impact, not always indicating loyalty, relying on customer memory, and lacking comprehensiveness.
- Complementary metrics: CES should be evaluated alongside metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Churn Rate, and First Contact Resolution (FCR) for a holistic view of the customer experience.
Why does Customer Engagement/Effort Score matter for your business?
Understanding and refining CES is critical for e-commerce and SAAS companies for several reasons:
- Loyalty Cultivation: Studies suggest that customers who experience less effort are more likely to return and become loyal patrons.
- Issue Resolution: Recognizing high-effort areas in the customer journey helps businesses pinpoint and rectify pain points, leading to quicker problem-solving for customers.
- Operational Efficiency: Streamlining processes based on CES insights can lead to operational improvements and cost savings.
- Enhanced Customer Experience: Making interactions effortless fosters a positive brand image, which can result in increased word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations.
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Reduced Churn: Effortless experiences reduce customer frustrations, thereby diminishing the likelihood of them switching to competitors.
How to calculate Customer Engagement/Effort Score (CES)?
Explanation of the parts of the formula:
- Sum of scores from all respondents represents the combined score value from every individual who responded to the CES survey. For instance, if five customers rated their effort as a 3 on a scale from 1 to 5, and another five rated it as a 4, the sum of scores would be 35 (15 from the first group and 20 from the second).
- Total Number of respondents is the count of all the individuals who participated in the CES survey, regardless of the score they gave.
- The resulting fraction provides the average effort score from all respondents. A high CES suggests a higher effort level was needed by the customer, whereas a low CES implies a seamless, low-effort experience.
In essence, the Customer Effort Score (CES) gauges the amount of effort a customer has to exert when interacting with a company or brand. Lower scores are ideal, indicating that customers found the process smooth and hassle-free, while higher scores suggest areas where the customer experience may need improvement.
Example Scenario
Imagine that after a new product release:
- Your company sent out a CES survey to 100 customers.
- 50 customers rated their effort as a 3, 30 customers as a 4, and 20 customers as a 5 on a scale from 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort).
Insert the numbers from the example scenario into the above formula:
- Customer Effort Score (CES) = (3×50 + 4×30 + 5×20) / 100
- Customer Effort Score (CES) = (150 + 120 + 100) / 100
- Customer Effort Score (CES) = 370 / 100
- Customer Effort Score (CES) = 3.7.
This implies an average score of 3.7, indicating a moderate to high level of effort felt by customers during their interaction with the new product. This information can be vital for the company to analyze and find ways to reduce the customer effort in the future.
Tips and recommendations for improving Customer Engagement/Effort Score
To improve CES, focus on simplifying customer interactions, personalizing the shopping experience, providing multichannel support, and soliciting regular feedback.
Streamline processes
One way to simplify customer interactions and improve CES is to eliminate unnecessary steps in the purchase or support process. This can be achieved by implementing features such as one-click purchases or reducing the number of form fields required during checkout. By making the process more streamlined and efficient, customers will have a smoother experience and feel less burdened to complete their transactions.
Offer multichannel support:
To improve CES, it is critical to provide customers with the flexibility to contact your business on their preferred platform. This means offering support through multiple channels such as email, chat, phone, and social media. By being available on multiple channels, you can cater to your customers’ different communication preferences, making it easier for them to engage with your business.
Seek regular feedback
Getting regular feedback from customers is essential to improving CES. By conducting surveys or gathering feedback in other ways, you can gain insight into the high-effort areas of the customer journey. This feedback can then be used to identify and address pain points, ultimately reducing customer effort and improving overall satisfaction.
Train customer service teams:
Another important aspect of improving CES is ensuring that your customer service teams are well trained and equipped to handle customer issues effectively. Providing them with the necessary knowledge, tools, and resources will enable them to resolve customer issues quickly and efficiently. Well-trained teams can provide better assistance, resulting in reduced customer effort and higher engagement levels.
Personalize the shopping experience
Personalization plays an important role in improving CES. By leveraging customer data and employing personalized marketing strategies, you can offer customized product recommendations that are tailored to each customer’s preferences and needs. This personalized approach reduces the effort required for customers to find what they are looking for, resulting in a more engaging and satisfying shopping experience.
Examples of use
Chatbots and FAQ Sections
- Scenario: An online electronics retailer notes that many customers contact their support about product specifications.
- Use Case Application: Implementing a chatbot on the site and a comprehensive FAQ section can offer instant answers to common queries, thus reducing customer effort.
Seamless Return Process
- Scenario: An ecommerce apparel store realizes that many customers find their return process convoluted.
- Use Case Application: Introducing a simplified return process, with prepaid labels and easy-to-follow instructions, can reduce customer effort and enhance their overall experience.
Personalized Search Functions
- Scenario: An online bookstore receives feedback that customers often struggle to find specific genres or authors.
- Use Case Application: Enhancing the search function with personalized recommendations based on browsing history can make the product discovery process effortless and more engaging.
Interactive Product Tutorials
- Scenario: A software-as-a-service (SaaS) company discovers that new users are feeling overwhelmed when navigating their platform for the first time.
- Use Case Application: Introducing interactive onboarding tutorials that guide users step-by-step can make the learning curve smoother, reducing the effort needed to understand and utilize the platform’s features.
One-Click Reorders
- Scenario: An online grocery store finds that repeat customers often purchase the same set of items every week.
- Use Case Application: Implementing a “one-click reorder” feature, allowing customers to instantly repurchase their regular items, can simplify the shopping process, saving time and reducing effort for the customer.
Customer Engagement/Effort Score SMART goal example
Specific – Improve the Customer Effort Score (CES) by 20%, moving the average score from 4 (out of 5, where 5 is high effort) to 3.2, reflecting a better and more efficient customer experience.
Measurable – The CES will be assessed through surveys sent to customers before and after the implementation of customer-centric improvements to the site or product.
Achievable – Yes, by improving the user interface, enhancing the FAQ section, simplifying the returns process, and implementing more effective customer service chatbots, among other actionable measures.
Relevant – Yes. Improving the customer experience aligns with the company’s mission to provide seamless interactions and foster customer loyalty, which can lead to increased sales and brand reputation.
Timed – Within one year of the initial CES assessment.
Limitations of using Customer Engagement/Effort Score
While the Customer Effort Score (CES) is an important metric for understanding the ease with which customers can achieve their goals in an e-commerce environment, it has limitations when used for business analysis:
- Limited to Specific Interactions: CES specifically measures effort related to certain interactions, like resolving an issue or making a purchase. This means it might not capture the overall customer experience or sentiment related to non-specific interactions.
- Sensitive to External Factors: The score can be influenced by external factors unrelated to the actual transaction or interaction. For instance, a customer frustrated by an unrelated event might rate the effort as high due to their mood.
- No Differentiation Between Types of Efforts: All efforts, whether it’s related to product search, payment, or returns, get the same weight. Some of these might be more critical than others, but CES doesn’t differentiate.
- Doesn’t Gauge Emotional Impact: While CES can indicate if an interaction was easy or hard, it doesn’t reveal how the customer felt emotionally, which can be a stronger indicator of loyalty and repurchase intent.
- Not Always Indicative of Loyalty: A customer might find an interaction low effort but might still not be loyal to the brand for various other reasons, such as product quality or brand values.
- Relies Heavily on Customer’s Memory: Asking customers to recall and rate an experience can be subjected to memory bias, especially if there’s a time gap between the interaction and the survey.
- Can Be Misleading Without Context: A low CES might indicate an easy process, but without understanding the context (e.g., a simple query vs. a complex issue), the score might be misleading.
- Not Comprehensive: CES focuses primarily on effort, but customer experience is multifaceted. Relying solely on CES might neglect other crucial aspects like satisfaction, net promoter score, or customer lifetime value.
In summary, while CES is a valuable metric for understanding customer effort, it should be used in conjunction with other measures to gain a holistic view of the customer experience. Relying solely on CES can lead to an incomplete or sometimes misleading interpretation of customer sentiment and needs.
KPIs and metrics relevant to Customer Engagement/Effort Score
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): While CES gauges effort, NPS measures overall customer loyalty and their likelihood to recommend your business.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): This metric offers insights into the immediate satisfaction of customers post-interaction or purchase.
- Customer Churn Rate: The percentage of customers who stop doing business with a company during a particular period.
- First Contact Resolution (FCR): Measures the percentage of customer issues resolved during the first contact.
Understanding CES in tandem with these KPIs can offer a holistic view of the customer experience, enabling more informed business strategies.
Final thoughts
In the age of customer centricity, the Customer Engagement/Effort Score (CES) is a measure of how seamlessly a company serves its customers. A focus on reducing effort not only increases customer satisfaction, but also boosts loyalty, referrals, and overall business growth.
Customer Engagement/Effort Score (CES) FAQ
What is Customer Engagement/Effort Score (CES)?
CES quantifies the ease with which a customer can engage or transact with a company, indicating the effort required on their part.
How is CES different from NPS or CSAT?
While NPS gauges customer loyalty and CSAT assesses immediate post-interaction satisfaction, CES focuses on the effort involved in customer interactions with a business.
Why is a lower CES score better?
A lower CES indicates that customers need to exert less effort, suggesting a more seamless and positive experience.
How can I gather data for CES?
The most common method involves customer surveys, where they rate their experience based on effort.
What should I do if my CES is high?
A high CES implies customers find it challenging to interact with your business. Identify pain points, seek feedback, and work towards simplifying processes.