Customer Effort Score - Are you measuring it? If so, how and when?
Hello TSIA Community,
We are looking into incorporating the Customer Effort Score into our transactional surveys (once cases are closed) and I was curious to see if, how and when you were measuring this within your organizations. Any insight would be appreciated.
Thanks!
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Hi @Patrick Martin,
Great question! We have a number of our clients using the Customer Effort Score (CES) question in their transactional customer feedback programs.@Patrick Martin The question is typically used after a service event has been completed.
Our recommendation is to place the question at the beginning of the question set. The score is helpful but, the real value comes from a follow up question asking "why" they gave you that score. Here is how we recommend you structure CES as a two part question.
On a scale of 1 -5 where 5 is very easy and 1 is very difficult, how would you rate, how easy it was to handle this service event?
You provided a (insert rating). May I ask Why?
Customer comments: ______________________________
For our clients we provide categorizing & trending of the comments. The trending allows for quicker insight & action to prevalent issues.
I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you are interested in learning more about our process
All the best,
Gail
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We absolutely do. It's included in the questonnaire sent to customer after an incident has been processed.
Goes like this:
Please indicate how much you agree with the following statement: *company name* made it easy for me to handle my issue.
Scores 1-5.
Simple, but it really gets the job done.
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Answers
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Unfortunately I don't have current data on this, the last thing I can find is from 2016, and at that time, 29% of members were tracking CES. But I know it is more common today. We do have customer effort score in the TSIA support services benchmark, so if you go through the benchmarking process you can find out the industry average and average for your peer companies.
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@Patrick Martin This is awesome. Do you use CES instead of CSAT or in addition to?
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@Greg Higgins we want to use it in addition to CSAT.
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Hi Patrick - TSIA recommends including a CES survey question as part of the transaction assist CSAT survey question set, and ditto for the self-service CSAT and Annual or Relationship CSAT survey (normally as the last survey question). Capturing the CES feedback from your customers will help you and your Support team Identify those customer-facing processes that have high effort level; and in turn, you can then ruthlessly improve upon those high effort level support processes. The result will leave your customers with an extremely positive view of how your organization responds to their CSAT/CES feedback and will foster the collaborative and loyal customer relationships that we all strive to foster with our valued customers.
Dave
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Great info Dave. What I love about CES is it helps identify those friction points that are painful to the customer, which is hard to do with just CSAT surveys.
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We're measuring both CES and CSAT in our transaction surveys, and compare with the TSIA benchmark quartiles.
We're using the CES 2.0 question:
To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement: <company> made it easy for me to handle my issue.
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This is a great thread! I see that best practice is to use CES in relation to a transaction survey (which we are currently doing on the Support side). I'm curious if anyone is using this for Customer Success as part of the transactions within a customer journey (e.g., onboarding processes, etc.). The goal is to use this in addition to NPS for customers.
Thoughts on best practice or implementation of CES for Customer Success?
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@Kelsey Hunsinger, I lead Customer Experience Office team, which has global responsibility for both: survey design and runtime execution and reporting on CES corporate-wide. We have been using CES for Customer Success since 2019 INSTEAD of CSAT to cauge B2B customer sentiment on quality and value, our High-Touch corporate accounts see in our High Touch Engagements such as Premium Services offerings, Professional Services projects, Custom-Development and the like as well as Services delivered to customers on License Audit and Compliance.
We use CES scale of 1-7, with top box responses: 6-agree, 7-strongly agree. The objective of the main question is to verify whether it was close to effortless: to order the service, to consume the service and to implement consulting recommendations from the service in customer's business environment.
Any thoughts or available research, exploratory activities: whether CES be an appropriate measure or indicator for "time to value" for B2B Customers, who use specific services by vendor of Cloud Software to speed-up getting value from this Cloud ?
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We are doing something very similar
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Thanks @Andrej Bievetski for the response! To your question - "Any thoughts or available research, exploratory activities: whether CES be an appropriate measure or indicator for "time to value" for B2B Customers" - that would be worth exploring.
I'm interested as well what other touchpoints outside of support are being used, such as Onboarding or Sales to Customer Success handoff, etc., and how those are being triggered systematically (or if they are manually triggered after a customer interaction).
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