Focus on the Customer Effort Score

Posted by Ahmed Macklai on January, 29 2020 8:29 pm

What is your contact center’s customer effort score? Many of today’s most successful call center’s don’t just know the answer to that question - they know why it matters. Not sure if you’re among their number? Just check out this handy guide to the customer effort score and why it matters for your center. You’ll soon be a master of making customer service effortless for those you serve!

What is the Customer Effort Score?

If you aren’t already tracking your center’s customer effort score, you might not know what the value of this figure is.

The customer effort score is a metric used to measure a very specific factor in customer satisfaction with your company - effort. How much effort did your consumers have to expend to engage with your company? This may not sound very important, but it is actually critical in creating a service approach that consistently delivers what your customers are hoping for.

The Value of the CES

Why is your CES so important? Effort is one of the most important elements of creating customer satisfaction and fostering consumer loyalty. Consumers want an easy and stress-free experience; providing this does a lot for both the customer and your company.

Less effort equals a happier consumer and happier customers are more likely to be “promoters”. A promoter is a person who is likely to share positive word-of-mouth testimonials with others and create business and positive regard for your business. A consumer who had a near-effortless experience is much more likely to do this.

Consumers are more likely to give you their repeat business if you give them an effortless experience. Studies have shown that over 90% of consumers who report having a positive experience will repurchase fro ma company as opposed to less than 5% of those who have a negative experience. Now, that’s a big difference!

Want to cut your costs? There are few better ways to do this without sacrificing service than to provide a better experience - specifically, a more effort-free experience. This is because the longer your consumer is on the phone - and the more actions your agents have to take, such as transferring, etc. - the more money each call costs your company. Lessening the amount of time and simplifying the calls your agents make or take will dramatically reduce costs over time.

Lastly, you can actually retain more of your employees with this technique. How? Effortless calls aren’t just a positive experience for your customers; they are also a great way to make the workday better for your call center agents. A great workday - day after day - can make sticking with the job more desirable. This leads to fewer agents leaving their positions and less costly turnover - a great way to achieve several of your management’s call center goals at one time!

Securing Your Center’s Customer Effort Score

The CES is typically secured by offering customers a survey directly after or a short time after their service session. There are several ways to ensure that you receive the maximum amount of feedback from these surveys. Employ as many of these as possible to get enough responses to properly measure your company’s CES.

Your customer effort survey should be as easy-to-use as possible. After all, the entire point of the CES is to measure how easy interaction with your company is for consumers. If your survey were to be difficult to access or use, it would not only discourage consumers from providing feedback willingly - it would essentially negate the purpose of having the survey altogether!

Surveys should be varied in their interactive style if you have more than a few questions. Choose a mix of multiple-choice, (very) short answer, sliding scales, and more to ensure you get the most accurate feedback while also engaging your consumer throughout the survey.

Keeping your survey short will also improve the odds that you will actually get feedback from customers. Using sliding scales is one great way to get an accurate reading - and one that is compatible with a numeric score format - while also keeping things brief.

Improving Your CES

So, now that you know what your customer effort score is and its importance, how can you improve it? Even if you’ve got a decent score, every business wants to make ongoing improvement - but how can you do so in your center?

One of the problems with improving your CES is balancing the quickness that today’s consumer expects when receiving service with the quality and efficiency that they also demand. Managers and business owners also look for ways to continually set their companies apart from competitors, which further adds to the complication of delivering simple service to consumers without compromising on all of these elements.

Reducing wait times will always have a positive impact on your most important metrics, including your Net Promoter Score and your customer effort score. The quicker you can resolve your consumers’ issues, the more valued they will feel - and the better scores you will receive from their feedback.

Providing self-service tools will also improve these scores. Customers today enjoy being able to serve themselves in many scenarios and having the freedom to do so will give them a more positive experience. Making that self-service easier to use? That’s a one-way ticket to a better CES!

Whether you’re looking to increase your customer effort score or just keep better track of important metrics, you’ll need the right technology to do it. At ChaseData, we have the software solutions your center needs to improve your customer service and make this year the best one you’ve ever had. For more information, contact the industry experts at ChaseData today!

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