Customer Effort Score (CES): A Key Metric for Measuring and Reducing Customer Pain Points

Customer engagement is the foundation of long-term business success. Building lasting customer relationships can lead to increased loyalty, higher retention rates, and positive word-of-mouth.  

Research shows that a seamless, low-effort experience encourages 94% of customers to stay loyal to a brand, highlighting the importance of reducing friction in the customer journey. 

Creating a seamless customer experience is critical for boosting loyalty, satisfaction, and referrals. Companies need to track customer ease and identify areas of friction along every point of the customer journey.  

How can you make it smoother for your customers to interact with your business?  

That’s where Customer Effort Score comes to rescue – an AI-powered tool for measuring satisfaction and optimizing customer engagement. 

What is Customer Effort Score (CES) 

Customer effort score (CES) is metric for the effort a customer must input to interact with a product/company or to complete a task successfully. Interaction might be fulfilling a request, getting an issue sorted, or simply making a purchase. 

CES offers valuable insight as to how you can make your customer interactions hassle free.  

Eventually the goal is to identify and correct points of friction and provide a more satisfying customer experience. It’s easy to implement CES findings across various survey channels and it provides easy tracking over time. 

Why CES is a Key Metric for Reducing Customer Pain Points 

Tracking CES across multiple customer support channels helps businesses discover which customer interactions are smooth-running and the ones that create friction.  

Also, your customer might have a smooth experience with calling your contact center but struggle with the self-service solutions. Such insight enables you to make important corrections to enhance your customer experience. 

A Direct Metric of Customer Loyalty

94% of customers who reported minimal effort expressed an intention to repurchase, and 88% said they would be buying more from the company.  

When your customers have a positive interaction with your brand – by exerting minimal effort – they are more likely to return and make recommendations to others. It makes it easier for your business to boost revenue and scale up over time.  

On the contrary, a bumpy customer experience is more likely to make them withdraw from your company.  

Identifies Specific Pain Points

Imagine a customer trying to locate a return policy on your website only to encounter a maze of dropdowns and pages – leading to frustration and withdrawal of the purchase. It could be a result of confusing pathways, hidden menus, or a poor layout.  

CES will help identify the specific pain point that’s causing customer dissatisfaction. A high CES score in customer service might show that customers find it challenging to get their issues resolved timely and effectively.  

Such findings allow brands to delve further into their customer journey and find specific bottlenecks – like convoluted processes, lack of useful information, or prolonged waiting times.  

Predictive of Future Customer Behavior  

CES is a strong predictor of customer behavior especially when it comes to customer churn. High-effort customer interactions suggest that these customers are less likely to stick around for long.  

A consistent influx of hurdles in customer interactions lead builds up frustration, reduced satisfaction, disloyalty, and ultimately, the decision to switch to a better competitor.  

CES helps you track these at-risk customers right off the bat. It lets you spot high effort patterns across specific touchpoints. 

Reduced Costs

Research from Gartner reveals that low-effort interactions are 37% more cost-effective than high-effort ones. This is directly linked to a favorable CES score, where lower effort translates into fewer escalations, quicker resolutions, and a reduction in support ticket volume.  

By focusing on improving your CES score, you can achieve significant cost savings and streamline operational expenses.

Assess and Enhance CES: Questions to Optimize Your Support Processes 

A good CES score can vary depending on company’s specific objectives, the complexity of product/service, or the industry standards. The goal is to top your previous score by monitoring trends over time, aiming for optimized customer experience. 

If your customer effort score is lower than expected and hasn’t gone up over time, you must dive deeper into your customer support processes.  

Considering the following questions to effectively enhance your CES:

• How many steps do customers have to take to get their issues addressed?
  Do customers have to sift through multiple channels, or can they easily find solutions in one place?

• How many attempts did it take to resolve the issue?
  Do customers have to follow up numerous times or was their issue handled in a single interaction?

• How long did customers spend at every stage of the resolution process?
  Are there specific points of delays or insufficiencies in customer journey?

• What are the obstacles coming in the way of a smooth resolution?
  Are there any unnecessary steps, outdated systems, or procedural bottlenecks that complicate the customer experience?

• Are your support agents equipped with the right tools and information?
  Do your agents have the resources needed to provide prompt accurate solutions, or are they lagging due to insufficient training?

• Are you using feedback to drive optimal improvement?
  Are you actively collecting and evaluating feedback from customers and support agents to make data-driven improvements?

• Can AI and automation help reduce customer effort?
  Consider how chatbots and automated systems can streamline interactions, provide quick answers, and cut the need for customers to invest effort.

How to Measure Customer Effort Score (CES)? 

Once you have your CES data, next you calculate the customer effort score. Each customer response corresponds to a specific rating on the scale, where a low rating indicates a high effort input. You can then use these ratings to calculate the overall CES. 

CES score measurement is straightforward. You collect customer responses after their interaction with your company. Usually, customers rate their experience on a predefined scale, such as 1 to 5 or 1 to 7.

Customer Effort Score Formula

For customer effort score calculation, you divide the sum of all ratings by the total number of survey responses.

                               CES = The sum of CES ratings ÷ Number of survey responses

In case of non-numerical responses, you assign numerical values to these symbols—higher values for positive feedback and lower values for negative feedback. That way you can calculate the CES customer effort score accurately even without a conventional rating scale.

How to Create a High-Impact Customer Effort Score Survey 

CES surveys must be put into action immediately after key customer interactions, for instance, following a product or service purchase. 

To gain a comprehensive insight into your customers’ experiences, CES surveys should be employed promptly following key interactions including product purchase, service completion, and any influential touchpoint.  

Extracting immediate feedback enables you to predict customer loyalty and highlight potential areas for improvement. 

A few factors to consider when creating your customer effort score survey: 

• Define Your CES Survey Goals  

Having a clear and concise goal to start with will help create a survey that is optimally functional. Whether it’s identifying the optimal customer outreach time or expediting the checkout process, begin with a clear objective in mind and design your survey accordingly. Customize your questions to capture feedback across various touchpoints, enhancing the overall customer journey. 

• Ask The Relevant Questions  

Design every customer effort score question in a straightforward multiple-choice query format. It’s also helpful to include an open-ended follow-up question asking customers to explain their rating. Also, keep the language simple, and avoid leading statements. 

• Time The Survey Right  

Send surveys at the right moment. For instance, don’t delay feedback requests on a support interaction—send the CES survey immediately after the issue is resolved.

• Mobile-Friendly Survey Optimization 

With over half of online interactions happening on mobile devices, ensure your survey is mobile-friendly. Ger rid of any extra content like logos, text, and external links to optimize survey. Place positive response options at the top and negative ones at the bottom. 

Minimize Customer Effort with Antlere  

Reducing customer effort is crucial for boosting satisfaction and driving loyalty. Attaining positive outcomes involves minding the gap between identifying pain points and implementing better processes to address them. 

Antlere provides AI-driven insights to help you streamline customer interactions, identify pain points, and optimize your customer experience. 

Ready to make every customer interaction effortless? 

Explore Antlere Solutions: Discover how our platform can transform your customer experience by minimizing friction and boosting satisfaction. 

Request a Demo: See Antlere in action and learn how our tools can help you achieve a lower CES and higher customer loyalty.