Customer Effort the Silent Driver of Customer Loyalty

What is Customer Effort?

Rather than just asking how satisfied your customer is, Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that allows you to measure how much effort the customer had to put in – either for their whole customer experience, or at a specific stage of the customer journey. (What is CES?)

Why is CES so important?

Customer Effort is not something a customer is always conscious of, but it is quietly powerful, as it is at the forefront of our decision making, especially when it comes to repeat purchases and experiences.

Why use a CES measure?

Increase customer loyalty

A clunky experience will make a customer think twice and consider their options the next time. As customers, we like convenience, and we like companies who are consistently easy to deal with. With so much investment in customer experience, it is important that the customer’s experience is friction free, seamless, and smooth – as this drives customer loyalty. High CES scores are also great tools for marketing and sales teams to attract new customers too!

Improve the user experience

A good Customer Effort measure will highlight how well designed and user friendly your products or services are. Incorporating a CES measure as part of your KPIs will shine a spotlight on those bumps in the experience where better training and process improvements are required - helping support you make more informed decisions whilst also minimising costly repeat behaviours. Internally, CES will allow you to set targets to drive the right behaviours, empowering your teams to focus on consistently providing friction free service.

Increase customer support time

In both the short and long term, by improving your customer experience through CES you will be reducing the workload on your customer service teams so they can deal with customers who need it most. More time spent dealing with customers who have had brand damaging experiences and turning them into brand enhancing ones is a far more effective use of time in your customer service teams.

Limit negative reviews

Better understanding the bottlenecks in all your customer touchpoints allows you to eliminate the processes and behaviours that could otherwise result in a negative review online. The cost of a frustrating customer experience is very high these days with social media posts that can spread like wildfire - is it worth the risk to not proactively manage?

Customer Effort is the ‘sleeping giant’ of customer experience metrics with ease and convenience being key drivers of customer loyalty. For truly reliable insight into how easy your company is to deal with, we recommend collecting customer commentary to explain the CES score awarded. To find out how you can benefit from adding a CES measure to your CX measurement suite, please get in touch with Danielle Sones (Experience Director). danielle@aba.co.uk / 0161 431 1221.