What is a Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Among various surveys conducted to measure customer experience, customer effort score (CES) is a prominent one. The culture of gauging customer satisfaction and experience started a decade ago. It was started as a mere exercise to know how impactful the internal processes and strategies really are. Knowing the results of the strategy implementation is important otherwise we would never know which of our strategies is good or bad.

That is why the BPO industries came up with innovative ideas to check the emotional and mental predicament of a customer when they seek assistance. CES helps companies to find how much struggle a customer has to put in order to get online assistance for their problems. Whenever a customer seeks customer care service, he has to go through some criteria, and those criteria should be hassle-free.

Let us say a customer has already brought a product or rendered service from X company, but the customer was not happy or found some issues related to the product or service. During such scenarios, a customer would naturally seek online customer care service for resolving their issues.
The customer will seek assistance through one of the customer support channels like email, call or online chat, convey their message and wait for the agent to respond with the best resolution for their issue.
Obviously, nobody would like to spend time waiting for a resolution to a problem that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. However, issues are inevitable in a product or service-oriented company.
Despite all that, even if the problem is conveyed, the customer should be able to get proper assistance and immediate solution for their problems.
Secondly, when a customer is seeking a service or buying a product online, they have to go through a series of steps for placing the order and making the final transaction. Everything needs to be done very carefully for avoiding the least friction.
Customer effort score (CES) is a metric that helps companies to know how much effort or struggle the customer had to make for processing a transaction. The transaction could be anything related to the product or service. The transaction could be related to pre-sales, order processing, or post-sales.
In the end, the objective of every company is to make everything convenient for the customer so they can remain loyal to their brand.
So companies usually conduct a small survey by the end of every conversation or transaction. In the survey, the customer is asked to rate the experience level of every transaction and some questions that will help the brand to locate the exact pain points of the customers so they can make respective improvements for the future.
CES is important, not only for brands but for customers as well. Customers need to make sure they regularly communicate their experiences to the brands so they can serve better in the future. Usually, customers tend to avoid these surveys because giving feedback is itself is tiring task for customers.

Conclusion: Ever since the advent of customer effort score (CES), companies are able to improve their service multi-folds. Earlier, companies did not have enough means to gather genuine feedback from their customers but with the help of these metrics, companies are able to track their performances very accurately.