A good customer success team is always looking to improve the customer experienceand make using the product/service easier. However, before you start improving the customer experience, you must first understand what is causing negative or high-effort customer experiences.

There are several ways to evaluate the experience customers have at different touchpoints of your brand or product. But in this case, the Customer Effort Score, or CES, is the most effective way to understand the experience customers have when they contact support.

Basically, CES helps you understand the degree of difficulty your customers experienced when interacting with your company or after a problem was resolved. The overall goal is to determine whether the customer interaction was easy or difficult, directly measuring the level of effort, such as many clicks, slow support, low effectiveness, difficulty navigating, among others.

If you've never heard of CES, the survey contains a question similar to this one, which can be customized according to the customer interaction or stage:

Furthermore, CES has proven to be the most accurate metric for measuring customer loyalty, as the results obtained through the research are a strong indicator of behavior, showing a high prediction of future purchases. The same study shows that 94% of consumers who report having interactions with a brand with "low effort" indicate that they would do business with that brand again.

Therefore, the Customer Effort Score plays an important role in the business world today. Eliminating or reducing negative CES scores can have a significant impact on your company, and also prove that your product/service is easy and accessible.

Let's talk more about this topic to understand the 6 common mistakes that may be impacting your client's efforts today?

Lack of communication between departments

It is increasingly common to see customers interacting with different departments within a company, such as sales, customer success , and customer service. Therefore, having a good "handoff" between departments is essential to prevent the customer from going through the same internal process multiple times.

In this case, centralizing customer information in management software greatly reduces the chances of repeated questions and duplicated processes, keeping customer effort low and team productivity high.

Expectations were not defined

Expectations are always a major issue within companies, as they represent a significant part of the customer experience for a simple reason – companies have no control over them.

Especially during the sales and implementation phases, teams usually don't skimp on the benefits, and in the client's eyes, their software becomes the solution they've been looking for – and their expectations rise considerably.

Therefore, it's important to have transparent communication with your client, so you don't end up overpromising at these stages and then failing to deliver. For example, a client asks about a customization feature they saw during the implementation phase, and you explain how to use the feature, but you don't inform them that they need to upgrade their plan before using it.

This is an expectation that could have been defined in the first conversation, through clear communication; after all, the sales team's objective is to qualify the client so that this type of situation doesn't occur in the post-sales stage.

Usability issues

One of the main factors contributing to high customer effort is the difficulty in using and interpreting your product/service. Poor usability can manifest in your product through bugs, navigation difficulties, slow loading times, pages requiring numerous clicks, or any situation that hinders your customers' interaction with your product or brand digitally.

A good tip for organizing and improving usability issues is to tag all these topics and prioritize the most frequent occurrences through search.

In a short amount of time, you can get an idea of ​​what's causing usability difficulties and then act proactively with the design team to resolve those issues. Keeping usability simple will help maintain good CES scoresby decreasing error rates during operation.

Confusing writing

Following the advice from the last topic, writing/communication problems are also at the top of the list of challenges, as they hinder the use of your service and result in high effort for the customer.

With confusing writing, the customer doesn't understand what you're trying to communicate or sell, and it's your customer service and support team that ends up being overwhelmed.

For example, a small typo or a missing comma can drastically alter the meaning of the written text. Write carefully and clearly so that your audience understands your message.

In this case, both the sales communication needs to be clear, as well as the internal product communication, such as the FAQ and internal documentation.

Many options for action

How do you feel when you have several action options and you don't know which one to press? I'm sure situations like that leave you with a lot of doubts, right?

When discussing navigation flows, Call To Action (CTA) buttons must be well-defined to avoid overwhelming the customer or forcing them to overthink. Therefore, always strive to optimize these buttons within the page to reduce error rates, as discussed in previous sections. The same reasoning applies to first call resolution in customer service .

For example, when the client is in the final stage of sending their email campaign, they look for the "Send Survey" button. In this case, it's not advisable to have a button next to it called "Restore Template," as it greatly increases the chance of errors and rework. Therefore, strategically place action buttons to avoid situations like this.

No self-service options

Good self-service options such as FAQs, documentation, and onboarding videos significantly reduce effort rates, as they allow customers to search for solutions before immediately contacting support.

All these simple questions that customers have could be answered in a learning center within the platform, or a good onboardingto assist customers with basic tasks.

The key is to avoid overloading your support team with simple, repetitive requests. Therefore, make it easier for your customers to help themselves, and they will be more successful in achieving their goals.

Conclusion

As you can imagine, there are several situations that significantly impact your customer effort score, right?

By following the steps in this article, you will certainly have a positive impact by identifying weak areas in the customer experience, focusing on the end-to-end customer journey

What you should keep in mind is that customer feedback is a goldmine for businesses. Therefore, there's nothing better than improving your product or service based on the opinions of those who use it most – your customers.

Having a system to effectively capture and analyze customer experiencemakes perfect sense for companies seeking to remain competitive in the market and reduce customer effort levels.