Ways to Lower Your Customer Effort Score (CES)

Ways to Lower Your Customer Effort Score (CES)

Research published in the book, the Effortless Experience suggests that “96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience.” And, unfaithful customers are likely to cost the company more since they spread negative word of mouth. Thus, CES correlates with business outcomes.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

It is a customer service metric that measures user experience with a product or service. Customers usually rank their experience ranging from "very difficult" to "very easy." This determines how much effort was required to use the product or service.

According to an HBR study, 94% of customers reporting low effort said they would consider repurchase while 81% of customers reporting high effort said they would speak negatively about the company to others. Hence, CES is believed to be the strongest predictor of customer’s future purchase behavior. And, organizations need to keep their CES as low as possible to deliver effortless experiences.

Here mentioned are easy ways in which a company can bring down its Customer Effort Score (CES):-

Be easily reachable through every touchpoint of the customer journey

Today, customers expect brands to deliver seamless experiences that do not require them to hop from one channel of communication to another. Therefore, by being present on the right channels using customer service center software, you can reduce the effort customers have to put in to get in touch with you. Further, to make sure you are easily accessible to your customers; you may start by mapping out the entire customer journey and choosing the support channels (chat, call, and email) that are convenient for your customers to reach out to you.

Invest time in improving or updating the service you offer

You need to focus on constantly updating your services to provide a satisfactory experience to the customers. Besides, you must offer instant help with a chatbot. Including a chatbot in your customer service portal would create a first-line of support that is available around the clock. This would contribute to facilitating a low-effort experience.

Provide customer support in multiple languages

If a customer doesn’t speak the same language as you, it would be quite difficult to resolve his/her issues. And, expecting your customers to manually translate each message that is received (or sent) takes you further away from maintaining a good customer effort score. So, as an effective solution, you must hire agents who are proficient in speaking various languages or set up special teams dedicated to providing support in different languages.

Reduce your average response time

To lessen your customer effort score, it is essential to ensure that your customers’ wait time is always low. Additionally, although it is important to give each customer issue an equal priority, you must understand that certain customer issues are more pressing than others and they need to be given a higher priority.

Collect and use customer feedback effectively

Feedback tells you what is working and at the same time indicates what you can do better to maintain a good customer effort score. Thus, attaching a customer satisfaction survey at the end of every customer support interaction would be ideal. And, if a customer gives you a poor rating, you must ask the customer the reasons behind it and thereby fix the problem accordingly.

To sum up:-

In recent times, brands often focus only on making sure that they deliver the services on time and ignore the effort that customers put into getting their issues resolved. However, it is imperative to focus on lowering your customer effort score. This way, you can deliver better experiences, improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately reduce customer churn.