What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?
Customer effort score is a measure of how much work a customer had to put into a purchase, return, refund, or other type of interaction with a business. It indicates if customers find an organization difficult or easy to do business with.
Customer effort scores are typically based on survey results about a specific transaction. For example, a customer might receive a survey following an online purchase that asks, “To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Acme Rollerblades made it very easy to make an online purchase,” and then the customer would rate the statement on a scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The survey might also ask for comments so the business can better understand what’s driving the scores.
In this particular case, the survey results can give the website team improvement ideas. But CES plays a more strategic role than identifying shopping cart enhancements. Customer effort score is strongly correlated to customer loyalty. Additionally, it’s a good predictor of future purchasing behavior and whether customers will promote your brand and products. Because of these qualities, customer effort score can be an important component of Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs.
Customer effort score also makes a useful and relevant contact center metric because it can measure how much work a customer had to put into getting an issue resolved. Making it difficult for customers to get help is, of course, bad CX, so contact centers should avoid these contributors to poor customer effort scores:
- Low first call resolution rates
- High internal transfer rates
- Low self-service success rates
- High queue times
- High hold times
About NICE Satmetrix
NICE Satmetrix is the leading global provider of Voice of the Customer (VOC) software used by the world's most forward-thinking companies to analyze and transform their customer service interactions. Our Customer Journey-based solution combines and analyzes customer interactions, solicited feedback, and operational data at enterprise scale to uncover blind spots, increase customer satisfaction and improve agent performance.
With consumers reaching out to contact centers for more reasons than ever before, providing consistent and optimized experiences is central to fostering loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value. NICE Satmetrix VOC enables businesses of all sizes to grow the value of customer service touchpoints and operationalize customer feedback.
With NICE Satmetrix VOC, the top VOC solution for contact centers, contact centers get access to:
Integrations with NICE inContact CXone and the NICE portfolio of contact center solutions
- Superior analytics
- Digital omnichannel and hassle-free IVR integrations
- Customer Journey-based design
- One-stop-shop for all your contact center VOC needs
NICE Satmetrix is the co-creator of the Net Promoter Score® (NPS®), one of the best indicators of customer loyalty and predictors of business growth. We've instilled our deep knowledge of consumer behavior into our VOC software to make NICE Satmetrix holistic VOC a true one-stop shop for Voice of the Customer with a self-service solution that meets the needs of organizations of every size.