Will the company resolve any issues I have quickly and easily? This question is one of customers’ primary concerns when first purchasing from a new business. In this blog, we’ll dive into the importance of this and why you should measure and understand your customer effort scores.
In today’s fast-paced digital world, the ratings and recommendations of a single individual often influence numerous other customers. Ideally, people want to be able to hear that a business is good before they try it for themselves. Five-star ratings and ‘excellent’ reviews are some of the most important pull factors that entice prospective customers to try your products or services. By showcasing customer ratings and reviews on your website, you can effectively leverage this positive feedback. This not only highlights your success to potential customers but also serves as a robust indicator of strength when compared to your competitors.
Organizations like yours dedicate significant effort to continually impressing customers with your products and services. This is because it’s well understood that this dedication fosters brand loyalty, promotes positive word-of-mouth, enhances reputation, and expands your customer base. Thus, it’s essential that you consistently strive for high levels of satisfaction in every customer interaction.
To better understand how your customers feel about your services, you need to ask them. Leveraging voice-of-the-customer surveys following interactions and communications is highly recommended. The more information and insights you can gather, the better your understanding will be.
What is a Customer Effort Score?
Customer effort scores (CES) are a critical metric in evaluating customer service. Essentially, CES enables you to understand how your customers view the ease of interactions with your brand. It offers a straightforward measurement and serves as a robust key performance indicator (KPI) for customer satisfaction. The CES scale delineates the effort demanded by customers, ranging from ‘minimal effort required’ to ‘incredibly difficult’.
Consequently, CES empowers a better understanding of customer satisfaction levels with your product or service offering and encompasses every interaction along their customer journey.
CES has gained immense popularity as a methodology adopted by customer success teams globally, spanning nearly every industry. The 2010 Harvard Business Review article “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers”, significantly influenced business leaders and fostered the widespread use of CES surveys and ratings.
To effectively capture customer experiences, it’s vital to send customer experience survey requests following specific customer interactions. Utilizing voice-of-customer solutions like Cyara CentraCX can automate the deployment of such surveys at the opportune moments. Furthermore, CentraCX boasts powerful reporting capabilities, enabling a deeper exploration of results to identify trends, outliers, and areas needing prompt resolution.
An Actionable Tool
CES surveys and their outcomes serve as actionable, specific predictors of future purchasing behaviors. They provide crucial insights into how likely your customers are to advocate for your brand. Failing to proactively gather and analyze CES data can take your company from basking in positive customer feedback to suffering from negative word-of-mouth, and all because of poor customer experiences that went unnoticed.
According to Statista, 62 percent of customers have stopped doing business with a brand solely due to one poor customer service experience. These lost customers directly translate to lost revenue. Moreover, it’s important to note that 96 percent of dissatisfied customers won’t voice their complaints to your business. Instead, they’re likely to share their negative experiences with approximately 15 of their friends and family. As such, negative experiences tend to garner more attention and spread further within social circles when compared to positive ones.
Creating an exceptional customer experience begins long before potential issues arise but becomes crucial when they do surface. With the continuous expansion of eCommerce, global outreach, and shifts in consumer behaviors, businesses now heavily rely on their communication networks. Notably, the voice channel (phone calls) remains the primary choice for customers dealing with complex, high-cost, or time-sensitive problems.
Cyara’s proactive monitoring of communication channels empowers you to efficiently identify, troubleshoot, and resolve issues long before they impact your customers, prospects, or agents. This proactive approach is indispensable in ensuring top-tier customer experiences, high CES ratings, bolstered loyalty and brand reputation.
Enhance Your Scores with Cyara
At Cyara, we assist our customers in achieving enhanced CES by ensuring top-tier communication channels that consistently support efficient and dependable customer interactions.
Cyara has developed comprehensive and proactive testing and monitoring solutions for each of your communication channels. These solutions enable you to optimize the experience and efficiency of each customer interaction.Would you like to learn more? Contact us today for further information or a demo of our solutions.
