2024 Key Performance Indicators for Customer Service: Customer Effort Score

What is Customer Effort Score?

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy it was for a customer to resolve their issue. It’s typically measured from low to high effort, most commonly on a 1-7 numerical scale (where 7 is easiest). Simply put, the more a company’s customer service department can keep customers from reaching out for assistance on the same issue, the better.

According to Gartner, the creators of CES, the appropriate way to measure it is to look at the percentage of customers that at least somewhat agree they had an easy experience—customers that give you a 5 or above.

As Customer Effort Score is a newer KPI metric for customer experience, our team couldn’t find any benchmarks that we could add to our 2024 Key Performance Indicators for Customer Service ebook. What you can do is go over your team’s current CES and compare it to last year’s performance. If it has improved, then great. That will give customers one more reason to stay loyal to your brand. If it has remained the same or worse, dipped, then use it as an opportunity to learn, grow, and improve.

Benchmarks 

Despite searching almost every corner of the internet, our team was sadly unable to find benchmarks for the best, average, and worst Customer Effort Score.

These tips will help improve your CES

Explore customer pain points.

A high effort score means that your customers felt like the entire process required effort. Did they spend a lot of time looking for your chat button? Maybe they tried to solve the issue with your help documentation and couldn’t. Or maybe it took them a long time to understand they were experiencing a technical issue that they couldn’t solve. Pinpointing these areas of friction is the first step in improving CES.

Use technology to identify and assist the most frustrated customers.

Optimizing for a low-effort experience is getting easier than ever. Conversational AI can quickly identify customer concerns and provide relevant resources. AI Voice of the Customer tools like Level.ai or Klaus can identify frustrated customers in real-time and push them to the front of your queue or escalate them to highly skilled team members.

Proactively engage with customers.

Rather than waiting for customers to notice a problem and reach out to you, engage with them first to address their needs or issues. For example, send an automated message with an order status update. If a user is on a help center article for more than a minute, proactively offer help. Modern chat tools can identify these opportunities and pull your agents in to assist.

Focus on your systems, not just your agents.

Look for areas to remote unnecessary steps of complexity. SunCountry Airlines dramatically improved their CX by giving travelers more options to manage their flights online – without contacting support. Check out our podcast with Jeremy Hyde, Director of Customer Service at SunCountry Airlines for more details.

Make customers’ lives easier with the help of a trusted partner 

Peak Support is an award-winning business process outsourcing company and a trusted BPO partner to both big companies and promising startups since 2015. We serve clients in various industries such as ecommerce, gaming, logistics, finance, healthcare, and more. Our team of seasoned customer service and support professionals will deliver great experiences that will help make your customers’ lives easier and better.

Talk to our sales team today to discuss how we can improve customer retention in your company by improving your customer effort score and other customer experience KPIs.