What is A Good Customer Effort Score Benchmark? A Comprehensive Guide

Navigating the realm of customer satisfaction metrics can be daunting, but benchmarking your Customer Effort Score (CES) against industry standards can provide invaluable insights into your performance. In this article, we delve into the significance of customer effort score benchmark, offering a comprehensive guide to understanding and interpreting these benchmarks. Join us as we explore how benchmarking can empower businesses to identify areas for improvement, elevate customer experiences, and stay ahead of the competition in today’s dynamic market landscape.

A Brief Overview of Customer Effort Score

A customer service metric called the Customer Effort Score (CES) gauges how much effort your customers believe they must put into a particular engagement with you in order to complete their tasks or meet their objectives. The fundamental goal of creating the CES is to precisely measure the amount of effort needed by the customer to resolve a problem and minimize it in order to increase the rate of customer loyalty.

Find out more: Customer Effort Score (CES): Definition & Ways to Measure

Benefits and Drawbacks of CES

Benefits of CES

• It accurately forecasts consumer behavior and satisfaction levels.

• It is very actionable and facilitates the immediate taking of corrective measures.

• It lets you identify gaps at every point of contact with the consumer.

Drawbacks of CES

• Not give a good picture of how customers interact with the company overall.

• It doesn’t provide you with a detailed explanation of the customer’s issues right away.

• Results are not broken down according to the kind of customer.

CES Question and Calculation

Ces Question

To calculate customer effort score, one can ask a straightforward CES question: How much do you agree with the following statement: The company made handling my issue easy? Customers often indicate whether they agree or disagree with a message on a standard scale that runs from 1 to 7.

1 = Strongly Disagree

2 = Disagree

3 = Somewhat Disagree

4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree

5 = Somewhat Agree

6 = Agree

7 = Strongly Agree

Customer Effort Score formula

When conducting CES Surveys with Feedback Software, the CES Calculation will be completed automatically. The straightforward formula below can be used to compute it manually if you’d like.

Let’s imagine you receive 12 responses, for instance: 3, 7, 5, 3, 7, 7, 6, 5, 7, 7, 7, 7.

Therefore, Addition of all Scores ÷ Total number of Respondents = CES

CES = (71) ÷ (12) = (3+7+5+3+7+7+6+5+7+7+7+7)

Your Customer Effort Score is therefore 5.9.

Read more: Customer Effort Score Survey: Questions and Tips

How High should a Customer Effort Score be?

Choosing a good Customer Effort Score (CES) might be challenging because, unlike NPS, there are no comprehensive industry standards or customer effort score benchmark to evaluate the score’s quality to. The kind of CES question you are asking and the CES scale you are using will determine the quality of your CES score. 

A Positive Score for Customer Effort

When a customer’s Customer Effort Score is positive, it indicates that using your products or services is effortless for them. It also shows that your customer service representatives are effectively resolving the inquiries from clients. Marketing and sales teams might use a strong CES score as a differentiator or testimonial to draw in quality leads.

A Negative Score for Customer Effort

If your customers have a negative customer effort score, it indicates that they are working harder to have their questions answered. This will either annoy your clients or cause them to stop doing business with you. You should follow up with them, enhance their customer experience, and shut the feedback loop to stop this churn. This aids in keeping clients loyal to your company.

Customer Effort Score Benchmark

To keep their firm one step ahead of its rivals, all prosperous businesses constantly benchmark themselves against their competitors. The following are the total customer effort score benchmark, per CEB Global:

Generally speaking, there are two things to keep in mind while CES measurement and benchmarking: 

• Are you getting better?Over time, is your customer’s effort decreasing? If so, you’re unquestionably heading in the right way. It is necessary to review business and customer service rules if it is static or if customers are showing more effort over time.

• Are there more positive than negative marks for you? If your bad ratings outweigh your favorable ones, that is a serious problem that needs to be addressed right away. This indicates that more clients and visitors are finding it increasingly difficult to do business with you. If your company and statistics show that this is a consistent pattern, you should address the causes right once and progressively create more positive encounters.

After you’ve mastered the first two steps, you can look at industry customer effort score benchmark to determine how your customer experiences compare to those of businesses in your area and domain.

Which Customer Satisfaction Statistic is superior, CES or NPS?

When customer happiness measures first emerged, this has always been a contentious question. Many business owners have posted Google searches asking: “Should I use CES or NPS in addition to CSAT to increase customer satisfaction?” You must first grasp the purpose of these measures in order to determine which is superior.

First off, let us explain that Customer Effort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are related survey measures that can be significant when used properly. You can determine the degree of client happiness and loyalty using both measurements.

The way it is deployed depends only on the circumstances. While CES has been shown to be a superior customer satisfaction KPI in certain circumstances, NPS has been shown to function more efficiently in others. Both metrics’ inquiries aim to raise the amount of satisfaction; CES achieves this through customer effort level, while NPS achieves it through customer loyalty.

In conclusion, benchmarking your Customer Effort Score against industry standards serves as a compass for navigating the complexities of customer satisfaction. By comparing your performance to industry customer effort score benchmark, you gain clarity on where your organization stands and uncover opportunities for growth. Embrace CES benchmarking as a strategic tool to drive continuous improvement, foster customer loyalty, and achieve excellence in customer experiences.