HOW TO

IMPROVE YOUR
CUSTOMER
EFFORT
SCORE

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Efforts, reflect someone’s interest in you. But, when it comes
to customer experience, it is just the contrary.
Regardless of what customers are trying to achieve – seeking
a solution for a hitch or buying a new product – reducing
customer effort and ‘making it easy’ is fundamental to
success.

The Law
of Least Effort
Laziness is built deep into human nature. Therefore,
each time your customer interacts with you, the
‘law of least effort’ applies to cognitive,
time, and emotional effort.

Simply put, when faced with a problem, your 96% of customers with a
customers don’t care about your business rules or high-effort service interaction
technology limitations. If there are several ways of become more disloyal
achieving the same goal, customers will gravitate
to the least demanding course of action.
compared to just 9% who
have low-effort experience
Source: Gartner

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What is Customer
Effort Score
Customer Effort Score (CES) is a survey metric that tells you how easy
or difficult it is for a customer to interact with an organization. It
typically measures the amount of time, and the effort the customer has
to put in to solve a problem. CES can gauge customer service
satisfaction levels and enable them to create loyal customers by
reducing effort.
Customer Effort Score is a better indicator of customer behavior than
NPS or CSAT. Pioneered by the CEB (now Gartner), CES determines if
you are a high effort or a low effort brand. In other words, it helps to
identify obstacles that cause friction in the customer journey and
remove it.

Instead of struggling to delight

customers, companies should create
low-effort service experiences that
help their customers solve problems
quickly and easily.
Source: CEB

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Why should you
measure Customer
Effort Score?
Reducing customer effort has an immediate revenue impact.
According to Gartner, moving a customer from a 1 rating to a 5
rating can boost loyalty by 22%. CES, therefore, has a direct impact
on customer loyalty, customer retention, reduced cost of service and
higher CX Index.

Low-effort experiences reduce costs by decreasing

up to 40% of repeat calls, 50% of escalations and 54% of
channel switching. Overall, a low-effort interaction costs
37% less than a high-effort interaction.

Ninety-four percent of customers with low-effort

interactions intend to repurchase compared with 4% of
those experiencing high effort.

When service representatives can provide better

experiences to customers, they feel better about their
jobs, and their intent to stay increases up to 17%.

Source: CEB

SERVION | HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CUSTOMER EFFORT SCORE | 4

The traditional way
of measuring Customer
Effort Score?
Single question metrics have gained popularity over time. A simple
multiple-choice question, and the percentage of customers who are at
least agreeing (i.e., the percentage of customer who strongly agrees,
somewhat agrees and agree) becomes their Customer Effort Score.
Scores from the method can be corrupted by response biases that
arise out of sample selection, survivorship, or confirmation while
gathering, analyzing and interpreting data.

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement:

The company made it easy for me to handle my issue?
Strongly Disagree
Disagree
Somewhat Disagree
Neither Agree or Disagree
Somewhat Agree
Agree
Strongly Agree

Source: Customer Effort Score 2.0 Starter Kit, CEB

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A new way of
measuring Customer
Effort Score
It is impossible to avoid traditional biases in a survey-based method.
You can overcome this impediment by using a customer experience
management platform like ServIntuit which uses technology
(patent-pending) to measure CES.

ServIntuit measure CES based on a set of variables that are applicable

across different channels of communication. It segregates CES into:

Cognitive effort: Amount of mental energy required to process

information such as the number of times a request is made to close
complaints.

Time Effort: Amount of time taken to address their needs, such as the
time spent waiting, queuing time, etc.).

Emotional effort: Psychological costs such as anger,

stress or fear related to addressing issues, due to failure in
technology, repeat calls and more.

As against the traditional survey-based method ServIntuit measures

CES implicitly without administering any question.

SERVION | HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CUSTOMER EFFORT SCORE | 6

Analyzing Customer
Effort Score
Measuring CES is just half the battle won. To effectively use it, you
need drill-downs beyond just the score to identify where do customers
spend most of their time, what are the process bottlenecks, what are
the kinds of interactions that lower your CES and which
product/service belongs to the high-effort category?

Servion has developed a contact center analytics platform

(ServInsights) that helps customer-centric organizations to address
the key imperatives of becoming a low-effort service organization.

With ServInsights, you can interactively drill down customer effort

score from cognitive, time, and emotional perspectives across
regions, products, and categories for deeper insights. By identifying
products or categories that are negatively impacting your CES, you
can reduce customer effort and increase satisfaction.

ServInsights allows you to analyze lifetime scores as well as

day-wise scores.

SERVION | HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CUSTOMER EFFORT SCORE | 7

7 Step Action to reduce Customer Effort:
Customer Effort Score can be a good indicator of loyalty and 6. Deploy Intelligent Self-Service Options
repurchase. Here is a 7-step action to offer an effortless customer
25% of customer service and support operations will integrate
experience.
virtual customer assistant technology by 2020. Consider offering
intelligence self-support options like chatbots and virtual agents.
1. Predict to be proactive
Leverage real-time analytics to personalize interactions. 7. Deploy AI-Led Automation
Proactively discover customer needs even before they express it Apart from ensuring efficiency and cost-optimization, artificial
with predictive analytics. intelligence-led automation technology by using analytics can
help organizations deliver low-effort services to customers.
2. Build continuity across channels
Build continuity of interactions from the past, present and offer an
omni-channel experience with a single well-knit story.
About the Author
3. Identify their context
Understand customer context – know their issues, their history,
and predict their interaction intent. Vimal Abraham is a Marketing
Evangelist. He helps organizations
4. Think beyond the customer in offering compelling experiences
to clients, partners, employees
Enable agents to access right information from their desk. and other stakeholders – whether
Empower supervisors to slice and dice data and identify trends it was evangelizing big data and
and patterns. analytics at IBM, or currently
building brand Servion as its
5. Offer Convenience Global Marketing Head.
Offer alternate channels of engagement for customers of the
future. Identify and prioritize next best channels for engagements
customers of today and tomorrow.

SERVION | HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CUSTOMER EFFORT SCORE | 8

 The bottom line is there is no silver bullet to improve customer experience
or reduce customer effort. Customer experience platforms like ServIntuit
and ServInsights can
About beGlobal
Servion integrated
Solutions with existing infrastructure to reimagine

installations & 60your

countries,customer
Servion has in-depthexperience.
With over 20 years of seasoned Contact Center experience across 600 customers, 1000s of
domain expertise in customer interaction
management. For more information, visit us at www.servion.com | marketing@servion.com

TALK TO OUR CX SPECIALISTS NOW

About Servion Global Solutions

With over 20 years of seasoned Contact Center experience across 600 customers, 1000s of
installations & 60 countries, Servion has in-depth domain expertise in customer interaction
management. For more information, visit us at www.servion.com | marketing@servion.com

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