What Is Your Customer Effort Score and Why Is It Important?
Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys are meant to find out how easy or difficult it is to interact with your company. The practice of getting CES surveys is based on the principle that customers are likely to be loyal to your products or services if they are easy to use. It focuses on the process that your customers have to go through when trying to get help.
Effort Matters
Putting in effort is one of the biggest contributors to loyalty. If a business puts in an effort to meet and surpass the expectations of its clients, it is likely to enjoy more customer loyalty. It does not only attract the loyalty of new clients but also keeps them from becoming disloyal. The disloyalty of customers may hurt your brand image. It may lower your sales.
Customer service representatives that manage to prevent callbacks can reduce the amount of effort and cost that customers have to go through when seeking help. According to Andrew Schumacher, Senior Principal, Advisory, Gartner, surpassing customer expectations can give you a significant increase in customer loyalty.
When to Measure Customer Effort
You can measure customer effort through various steps of the customer journey. Consider getting a CES after the following stages:
- Online checkouts
- Website visits
- Interactions with your customer service team
- Customer meetings
- Sales interactions
Customer effort may not serve its purpose unless it is available on multiple channels. Use omnichannel service to minimize customer effort and friction between different service channels. High-effort experiences are indicated by factors such as repeat interaction, generic service, and switching to different channels.
The Importance of Customer Effort Score
There are many benefits to reducing customer service effort. Some of them include the following:
Increased Customer Loyalty
94% of customers with low-effort interactions are likely to purchase. They are likely to maintain loyalty to your business. Only 4% of customers with high-effort experiences may stay loyal.
Better Employee Retention
Service reps that get positive feedback from clients are likely to stay with your company for a long time. Their desire to stay with you may increase by up to 17% because they feel good about their jobs.
Improving Your Brand Image
Reducing customer effort can go a long way in boosting your brand image. It is not just about making extra sales. If reducing customer effort is at the core of your organization, you have to adopt new philosophies in every stage of customer interactions.
Whether your customers need help with the warranty process, returns, canceling purchases, or a service helpline, their experience should be smooth. You may change your employee training to pay more attention to customer satisfaction. It may help you build strong relationships with customers and maximize the impact of all your customer interactions.
Lower Costs of Customer Service
Low-effort interactions can help you save up to 37%. A high-effort interaction could result in an escalation of issues, channel switching, and repeat calls.
Value to Customers
Customers will always appreciate your effort to improve their experience. Providing value to your customers promotes loyalty, repeat purchases, and credibility. Even though having high-quality products and services is the best way to provide value, reducing customer effort is essential as well.
Without a doubt, reducing the amount of effort that customers have to put in to solve their problems is critical to improving the quality of their experience. By removing hurdles for the customer, businesses can promote loyalty and increases their sales. They can improve their brand image and reduce the cost of customer service. Customer Effort Score surveys are critical for both big and small businesses because of their benefits.
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