Navigating & Fulfilling Customer Expectations
Different terms and parameters are now being used to monitor and indicate how well or how poorly businesses perform in today’s world. The epicenter of a business’s success is customer satisfaction. And there needs to be some sort of measure of this. One such parameter is the customer effort score.
Customer effort score is a qualitative consumer experience metric and a scale from 1 to 7 that measures how hard the customers had to work to interact with and resolve their problems with service representatives. Some businesses use a scale of 1 to 5. So what exactly is a reasonable customer effort score? A good CES lowers the scale and implies that the customer is satisfied. The lower the score, the easier the customer’s experience was concerning your product or service.
Customers want an easy and practical way to interact with your business. Otherwise, they’d eventually lose motivation and give up altogether. If you want to understand how much effort consumers have to put in doing business with you and foretell impending failure, you can use the customer effort score. The customer effort score can be calculated by prompting a short survey and asking customers to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 (or 7) how easy (1) or how difficult (5 or 7) their interaction had been while trying to resolve their problem. Some businesses also use faces with different expressions, ranging from a delighted, satisfied face to a red, angered face.
Customer effort score (CES) data is collected by surveying customers after their action, for instance, the purchase of a product or communication they’ve had with a customer service representative. You can prompt the survey to appear directly on a website page after the purchase or be emailed as soon as the order is processed.
Customer effort scores indicate how likely they are to recommend your service or brand to a friend or family and what kind of reviews they’d leave for other consumers to see. To a certain extent, the score can also predict if they’d be back for another purchase. CES data also provides one-way employees can get feedback and measure their performance. The better the feedback, the better they’ll feel about their jobs and the higher the chances they will retain their job.
On the other hand, customer service scores give you minimal data and do not document the experiences of all consumers on the spectrum. For example, if a customer has had a great experience with your service, they’d take the time out and be more likely to put in the effort to fill out your survey. Conversely, a dissatisfied customer will likely not even put further work into filling out your survey. Furthermore, if and when a customer is dissatisfied, there is no real way to know the reason behind their poor experience through the survey.
Customer effort scores are a good single-item metric to get an idea of how well you’re doing in business. But it goes without saying; it does not give an in-depth detail of the overall customer experience and which areas need more work than others.
