Glossary

Customer Effort Score

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customer experience

Your business should always strive to make using your products and interacting with your company as effortless as possible for your customers. Here is an overview of what a customer effort score is and why it is important for your business!

What Is a Customer Effort Score? 

A customer effort score is a simple metric that your business can use to assess how easy or difficult the majority of your customers find using your products and interacting with your company to be. It consists of a single question that asks customers to rate their overall experience in this area. 

Customer Effort Score FAQs

Here are some of the most important things to know about what customer effort scores are and why they are important for your business!

Why Is My Customer Effort Score Important? 

Your customers are more likely to continue to choose your business if they find your products easy to use than they are if they are usually frustrated with some aspect of their order, and analyzing typical customer effort scores can give you insights into how well your business is performing in this area. 

What Are the Benefits of a Strong Customer Effort Score? 

Here are some of the most important ways a strong customer effort score can benefit your business!

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Customers that find your product easy to use and your brand easy to interact with are generally more satisfied with their overall experience with your business, which makes them more likely to recommend your business to others and continue choosing you when they have similar needs in the future. 

Increased Loyalty and Retention

Turning new customers into repeat customers and giving loyal customers even more reasons to keep coming back is an important step in continuing to serve them well over time, and customers that consider your products easy to use are more likely to continue to choose your brand than customers that find your customer service frustrating or struggle to get your products to work how they want them to. 

Enhanced Customer Experience

Products that are easy to use and customer service that is capable of quickly and efficiently solving any problems your customers do experience go a long way toward improving the overall experience your customers have interacting with your business. 

Improved Operational Efficiency

Your business can function more efficiently when you are able to spend less time helping customers solve problems. Although it is still important to provide a strong customer service team to assist your customers, reducing the number of problems they have to contact you about in the first place and being able to provide quick solutions to issues that do come up allows you to use more of your limited resources on other things than having to devote a significant amount of time to working through lengthy conversations with a high percentage of customers. 

Competitive Advantage

Customers naturally gravitate toward brands they have had few to no problems with in the past, which means that striving to reduce the amount of effort they need to put into choosing your business naturally gives your business a strong competitive advantage. 

How Is My Customer Effort Score Calculated? 

Your customer effort score is calculated by dividing the number of customers that indicated that your product or service was at least somewhat easy to use by the total number of responses. 

How Can I Improve My Customer Effort Score? 

Identifying specific areas in which your customers indicate that they struggle the most with your products or feel the most frustrated with your brand can give you ideas for the most important areas to make improvements in. Although a basic customer effort score does not include this information, you can ask follow-up questions that ask them to elaborate on why they selected the rating they did. 

What Is a Good Customer Effort Score? 

There is no single way to determine whether a good percentage of your customers have indicated that your products are easy to use because both this rating and how your business interprets it are subjective. However, you should strive to have as many customers as possible provide responses that indicate that they did not encounter any significant problems using your products. 

When Is It Ideal to Use a Customer Effort Score? 

You should ask your customers to provide a customer effort score immediately after receiving their order or service. Waiting any longer may lower their interest in responding. 

What Are the Most Common Questions That Make Up a Customer Effort Score? 

Some common ways to phrase a customer effort score include: 

  • On a scale of 1 to X, how easy or difficult do you feel this product is to use? 
  • On a scale of 1 to X, how quickly were you able to solve the problem you experienced? 
  • On a scale of 1 to X, how knowledgeable was the team member you interacted with? 

Always be sure to indicate what each end of your scale means to make sure customers do not accidentally provide very low ratings when they meant to provide very high ratings or vice versa. You can also use emoji faces instead of numbers to make sure they understand their selections. 

Contact us today to learn more about how understanding your customer effort score can benefit your business!