Customer Effort Score (CES)- A Modern Intro

In the past, I have talked about NPS (Net Promoter Score) as the de facto standard for measuring Customer Loyalty.

In 2008, the CCC (Customer Contact Leadership Council) a division of the Corporate Executive Board (CEB is now part of Gardner) created the Customer Effort Score (CES), as a better alte
ative to NPS. CCL believes their CES metric to be both a better and more predictive method of surveying customers.

CCC made a study of 75,000+ customers who have had an interaction with customer service all possible communication / contact channels (e.g. phone, email, chat, etc.), and they performed literally hundreds of structured interviews with customer service leaders worldwide.

FYI, this study of the 75.000+ customers, was based in getting answers to the following 3 questions:

How does customer service affect loyalty?
Which customer service activities increase loyalty and which do not?
Can companies increase loyalty without raising their operating costs?
What is CES?

The idea behind CES is to ask the customer how much effort s/he put into a certain interaction with the company; for example, during a technical support call or during a visit at a Customer Service Department to resolve a billing problem or exchange a merchandise.

CCC/ CEB research showed that “Service organizations create loyal customers primarily by reducing customer effort – i.e. helping them solve their problems quickly and easily – not by delighting them in service interactions”.

According to CCC/ CEB’s findings:

if customers are forced to put forth high effort, they’re 96% more likely to be disloyal,
only 9% of customers with low effort are more disloyal.
So, the original CES single question in 2010 was: “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?”, with an answer- rating scale starts from 1 (very small effort) to 5 (very big effort).

Due to problems with interpretation consistency, universal applicability, and cross-industry benchmarking capabilities, in 2013, CCC/ CEB came out with an improved CES version. CES version 2.0 is based on the statement: “[Name of the organization] made it easy for me to handle my issue”; customers are asked to express their level of agreement / disagreement with this statement on an enhanced seven-step scale from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 7 (Strongly agree).

For course in practice, different business use their own variation of the CES- scale and rephrasing of the question/ statement.

NPS and CES are complementary measures

When comparing the NPS and CES score, research does show that indeed these scores correlate with each other:

customers that indicate they had to make little efforts to fix a problem, also tend to give a high NPS.
However, it might be a great idea to utilize/ use both of these 2 measurements in every single survey, since:

NPS gives you a picture of your customer satisfaction on an overall level, andr
CES specifically indicates how you perform in handling customer issues.
The Business Case with CES

Case studies of companies using CES (e.g. British Telecom) have found that “it has helped to:

Demonstrate project success – Decreasing effort scores highlight the effectiveness and success of certain changes.
Influence rep behaviors – As reps understand the importance of effort, they focus more on experience engineering.
Detect process fixes – Identifying specific call types with unusually high effort scores can indicate potential areas for process improvements.”
Studies have shown that customers who exert “high” effort (4 or 5 on the CES scale) are 61% less likely to repurchase and 23% less likely to increase spend with an organization – as compared to the average customer. Use existing data regarding the percentage of customers who renew contracts annually or your general customer chu
rate to get an average repurchase rate, and then figure out the expected loss in repurchase from high effort customers specifically

Also a quite interesting and surprising field- study result is that 89% of the interviewed customer service managers bet on “exceeding customers’ expectations” and very disturbing that 84% of customers felt their recent interactions “did not exceed their expectations.” Simply put: there is little correlation between satisfaction and loyalty.

“With BT in particular, we found that the rate of customer loss or easy scores was found to be significantly less than others and showed a 40% reduction in the propensity to churn. If you're easier to do business with your much more likely to stay, essentially. We also found that in B2B companies, too. Being easy to do business with prevented customer defections and they’re more likely to stay.”

Finally, according to published studies, CES 2.0 should be 1.8⨠better at predicting customer loyalty tha
Customer satisfaction (CSAT)and 2⨠finer tha
Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Suggested CES Success KPIs

Total # of requested CES feedbackr
Total # of collected CES feedbackrn% of collected feedback from total feedback requestsr
Percentage- distribution of feedback on CES scale (1-7) …..
CES Criticism

There is plenty of criticism and it’s all about the fact that CES is solely focused on the effort or effortless customer experience during the resolution of an issue. Sure, it is great if you are benchmarking the efficiency of your Customer Service. But, it does not tell you absolutely nothing about the customer who had no problem or who decided not to contact your Customer Service.

In Conclusion

Implementation of Customer Effort Score will definitely help you improve Customer Loyalty, by knowing how much effort your customers must put into resolving their problems.

Basically, you will have your customers pinpointing your attention right to the shortcomings of your service or product.

CCC/ CEB believes that a low effort customer experience is the cornerstone of customer loyalty. Do you believe that too?

Still, keep in mind that in the 75.000+ customers’ study, 89% of the Customer Service Manages felt/ bet on exceeding expectations, while 84% of those 75.000+ customers felt they their expectations were not met!!

Thank you and Good Luck w/ your CES implementation.

Spiros

About the author: Spiros Tsaltas is associated with a unique Customer Loyalty Startup: HireLoyalty ( www.HireLoyalty.com ) which is coming out of stealth mode in the next few months.

He is a seasoned Technology & Operations Executive and Management Consultant; he is also a former University Professor (RSM MBA, CUNY, etc). Spiros has hands-on experience on setting up all sorts of Startups both in the US and in Europe. He is an active transformational leader and strategist who has also years-long experience with Boards of Advisors and Boards of Directors. He is currently assisting a couple of Ghanaian companies with the setup of their BoDs.

As a NED (Non Executive Director) Spiros is also associated with HIREghana ( www.HIREgh.com ) and can be hired via them.

He welcomes all your comments/ remarks/ feedback at Press@HireLoyalty.com

© 2017 Spiros Tsaltas and © 2017 HireLoyalty