You may have solved your customer’s problem, but if it took them digging through three help articles and sending six emails to get there, was it a good customer experience?

Companies are shifting the metrics they measure to better serve modern customers, and the Customer Effort Score (CES) has quickly risen to the top. Unlike the Customer Satisfaction Score, CES examines the entire customer support experience from start to resolution. And instead of focusing on parts of the service experience, like channel or agent performance, it tackles a bigger question: how easy or difficult it is for customers to get issues resolved.

Why modern support teams are measuring customer effort

More than ever, customers crave convenience. They want to expend as little energy as possible to get issues resolved. The Customer Effort Score gives customers a chance to share any challenges they face along the way, so companies can take steps to improve the support experience. It’s a powerful way to measure end-to-end customer service satisfaction and a leading indicator of customer loyalty.

With that in mind, we’re excited to reveal our newest question type: Customer Effort Score. Adding to our library of pre-built survey templates and question types, measuring Customer Effort Score is now easier than ever.

Since Customer Effort Score is all about ease of getting an issue handled, it’s a natural fit after service and support interactions. Modern companies pride themselves on delivering multi-channel, 24×7 support. In theory, it should add up to the perfect customer service experience. But in reality, more channels means more room for issues to fall through the cracks. Customers may bounce around different support documents and talk to multiple reps, re-explaining their issue over and over again before getting an answer.

Measuring Customer Effort Score helps companies identify those process failures and make changes to fix them.

How to get started with Customer Effort Score

To get started, add a new question to your survey and choose the “Customer Effort Score” question type. The question and answers will be pre-populated, so adding this question is a breeze. The Customer Effort question uses the Likert scale, giving respondents a statement and asking them to rate how much they agree or disagree on a seven-degree scale from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree).

Pro Tip: Embed your Customer Effort Score right inside your email with GetFeedback’s One-Touch email to supercharge engagement and boost response rates

We suggest using a Short Answer follow-up question to understand why your customer gave you that score.

You’re measuring CES. Now what?

• Set up real-time dashboards to keep a pulse on your Customer Effort Score. Since your respondents answer on a 1-7 scale, you can report on CES as an average score or percentage. We consider a score of 5+ or 70%+ to be “healthy”.

• Configure notifications that alert your team when a high-value customer gives you a low CES, so you can close the loop faster.

• Tap into Text Analytics to track the most common keywords and phrases, as well as sentiment, your customers use. This makes it easy to identify trends in customer comments and flag issues, issues you may have otherwise missed.

• Prioritize process improvements. Whether you need to write new help articles, better train your agents, or implement new technology, CES feedback helps drive action.

Wrap-Up

The Customer Effort Score question type makes it super easy to measure and understand the holistic customer service experience. It is available now to all GetFeedback customers. Check out our Complete Guide to Survey Question Types for an overview of our survey question types and best practices — everything you need to know to craft the perfect survey and collect high-quality feedback.