A good customer success team is always striving to improve the customer experience and make using the product/service easier. However, before you can begin improving the customer experience, you must first understand what's causing negative or high-effort customer experiences.
There are several ways to measure customer experience at different touchpoints with 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 contacting support.
Essentially, CES helps you understand the level of difficulty your customers experienced when interacting with your company or after an issue was resolved. The overall goal is to determine whether the customer's interaction was easy or difficult, directly measuring the level of effort involved, such as too many clicks, slow support, low effectiveness, difficult navigation, and more.
In case you've never heard of CES , the survey contains a question similar to this, which can be customized based on the customer's interaction or stage:
Furthermore, CES has proven to be the most accurate metric for measuring customer loyalty , as survey results are a strong predictor of behavior, showing a high predictor of future purchases . The same study shows that 94% of consumers who report having "low-effort" interactions with a brand indicate they would do business with that brand again .
Therefore, the customer effort score plays an important role in today's business world. Eliminating or reducing negative CES scores can have a significant impact on your business and also demonstrate 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 sectors
It's increasingly common to see customers interacting across different departments within a company, such as sales, customer success , and service. Therefore, having a good "handoff" between departments is crucial to prevent customers from going through the same internal process multiple times.
In this case, centralizing customer information in management software ends up greatly reducing the chances of repeated questions and duplicated processes, maintaining low customer effort and team productivity .
Expectations were not defined
Expectations are always a big issue within companies, as they play an important part of the customer experience for one simple reason – companies have no control over them.
Especially in the sales and implementation phase, teams don't usually skimp on the benefits, and in the eyes of the customer, your 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 during these stages and then failing to deliver later. For example, a client asks about a customization feature they saw during the implementation phase, and you explain how to use the feature but fail to 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 customer so that this type of situation does not occur in the post-sales stage.
Usability problems
One of the main factors behind high customer effort is difficulty using and interpreting your product/service. Poor usability can be found in your product through bugs, difficult navigation, slow loading times, pages with numerous clicks, or any situation that forces your customers to interact 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 research.
In a short amount of time, you can get a sense of what's causing usability challenges and then proactively work with the design team to address them. Keeping usability simple will help maintain good CES scores and reduce error rates during operation.
Confusing writing
Following the advice from the last topic, writing/communication issues are also high on the effort list, as they make it difficult to use 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 your customer service and support team 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 your audience understands your message.
In this case, both sales communication and internal product communication, such as the FAQ and internal documentation, need to be clear.
Many options for action
How do you feel when you have several options for action, and you don't know which one to choose? I'm sure situations like these leave you with a lot of doubts, right?
Call-to-Action buttons should be well-defined so as not to overwhelm the customer or force them to think too much. Therefore, always strive to optimize these buttons within the page to reduce error rates, as discussed in previous topics.
For example, when the client is in the final stages of sending their email campaign, they look for the "Send Survey" button. In this case, it's not recommended to have a "Restore Template" button next to it, as it greatly increases the risk of errors and rework. Therefore, strategically position your action buttons to avoid situations like this.
No self-service option
Good self-service options such as FAQs, documentation, and onboarding videos significantly reduce effort rates by giving customers the option to search for a solution before contacting support immediately.
All these simple questions that customers ask could be made available in a learning center within the platform, or done with good onboarding , to help customers with basic tasks.
The tip is to avoid overwhelming your support team with simple, repetitive requests. Make it easier for your customers to help themselves, and they'll 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'll certainly have a positive impact by identifying weak areas of the customer experience and focusing on the end-to-end customer journey
What you should keep in mind is that customer feedback is a goldmine for companies. Therefore, there's nothing better than improving your product or service based on the people who use it most—in this case, your customers.
Having a system to effectively capture and analyze customer experience makes perfect sense for companies looking to remain competitive in the market and reduce customer effort levels.
