How to Calculate Your Ecommerce Brand's Customer Effort Score (CES)

Ever wonder how much "effort" or friction your customers put into shopping with your eCommerce brand? Well, now you can find out with a metric called the Customer Effort Score (CES). Keep reading to learn how to calculate your brand's CES, and what you can do to improve it.

What is the Customer Effort Score?

The Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that quantifies how much "effort" a customer has to put forth in order to do business with your eCommerce brand. It's a way of gauging customer satisfaction, and it can be helpful in identifying problem areas in your customer experience operations.

CES surveys typically ask customers how easy or how difficult it was to interact with your brand and are often sent to each customer at the end of a purchase.

Specific touchpoints in the customer journey where you can ask customers about their effort level include:

• Registering with your site

• Adding items to the shopping cart

• Entering shipping information

• Reviewing and confirming the order

• Making a payment

• Fulfillment & shipping

• Returns & warranty support

• The overall shopping experience with your brand

How is CES Calculated?

There are a few different ways to calculate CES, but the most common method is to simply ask customers how much "effort" they feel they had to put forth in order to do business with your brand. This can be done through surveys, interviews, or even casual conversations.

Once you have gathered this information, you'll need to convert it into a numerical score. The scale typically ranges from 1-5, with 1 being "very easy" and 5 being "very difficult." You can then take the average of all the scores to get your brand's CES.

How to Build Great CES Surveys

As listed above, CES surveys should be sent to customers immediately after purchases or after specific customer service touchpoints. Effective CES surveys generally include the following characteristics:

• Short & Simple. Your CES survey should include one to two questions. We generally recommend starting with one question and expanding to a second if there is a compelling need to do so.

• Automatic. Help desk software like Zendesk, or customer experience platforms like Qualtrics can help automate the sending of your surveys (typically via email or a live chat window). Don't rely on any manual email sends or similar efforts that won't be sustainable or scalable.

• Mobile ready. Regardless of your market or industry, many or most surveys will be completed on mobile devices. This again reinforces the need for automated tools. And, similar to the point above, mobile screens also make simplicity critical. Remove any superfluous content, text, logos, links, buttons, etc. in your CES survey.

What is a "Good" Customer Effort Score?

There is no definitive answer on what a good or bad customer effort score is, as it will vary depending on your business and target customers. However, a good rule of thumb is that you should aim for a score of 2 or below. This indicates that customers don't feel like they have to put forth a lot of effort to do business with your brand, and that they're generally satisfied with their experience.

Better yet, regardless of the specific scores you're seeing today, your primary goal should be continuous improvement in those scores.

Your CES survey will generate actionable feedback to help you:

• Reduce friction in customers' experience with your brand

• Improve customer satisfaction over time

• Build brand loyalty among customers who enjoy shopping with you

CES and the Customer Experience Scorecard

The Customer Effort Score is incredibly useful and insightful, but it is not the only important metric to focus on. Generally, at Rush Order, we recommend using CES as a single data point as part of a broader Customer Experience Scorecard.

Other uses for CES surveys

Customer Effort Score data, as well as other CSAT and Customer Experience metrics should be broadcast far and loud with your company's key internal stakeholders. Regardless of what the data says, CES can help build consensus across customer support, sales, marketing, and technology teams to drive improvement in your customer experience. This data is intended to make improvements in CX and help grow your business, but it won't have the desired effect if it is trapped in a silo.

Additionally, customer service agents should be empowered to follow-up with each customer and resolve any glaring issues highlighted in each CES survey response. These are real customers giving you real feedback. If any single customer is struggling needlessly, this may be a great opportunity to reduce frustration and, better yet, even create a new advocate for your brand.

Broadly sharing CES and other CSAT success stories externally can be a great marketing tactic as well. For example, if over 90% of your customers report an effortless shopping experience, you should sing this positive metric from the rooftops to attract more customers. There is a long list of ways in which you can "show off" positive CES results and keep the momentum rolling.

Lastly, improving CES scores over time has a way of improving customer service agent morale as well. This is a very important point and, while not obvious, should not be overlooked. We all enjoy coming to work and being successful in our roles. CS agents benefit from and enjoy seeing progress in their brand's performance. Imagine supporting customers who are continually frustrated by the same issue, and then one day your employer permanently fixes the issue and the frustrated customer outreach ends. Those wins are celebrated and enjoyed by your agents as a result of your CES measurements. Better yet, happy agents create happy customers and you've thus accelerated the flywheel of overall customer experience success.

Parting thoughts on Customer Effort Scoring

We hope this little article is helpful as you begin your journey with CES and CSAT measurements in general. If you haven't already done so, please sign up for our free monthly newsletter and/or learn more and download Rush Order's CX Balanced Scorecard template for your own use. We safeguard your data and there's never any obligation to join and keep learning about building great customer experiences.