SightMill
Improve product efficiency with CES surveys
Measure, track and improve the efficiency of your products and services
Quick start to CES surveys with SightMill
SightMill provides pre-built templates to implement CES surveys in minutes by email, SMS, on your website, at events, using links or our API.
To setup your first CES survey follow these steps:
- Log in to your account
- Select New Project
- Name your Project
- Select CES as the survey type - other options include NPS and CSAT
- Click Save
Your new CES survey project has been setup with default templates for email, SMS and website surveys; you can start using these or customise to your requirements.
Improve how easy it is for customers to use your products
To measure and improve how easy it is for customers to use your products and services, use CES (Customer Effort) surveys; these surveys ask a simple question where the answer is a rating between 1 and 7. The CES score is designed to help you understand how easy it is for a customer to carry out a particular task - for example, place an order, submit a ticket or use your products or services. The CES survey generates actionable insights to help you make improvements and so improve ease of use and so improve overall customer satisfaction.
What is the CES score?
The CES score is reported on a scale of 0 to +100 (with a higher score showing a product or service that's easier to use).
What is CES used for?
CES surveys are great for understanding how easy it is for a customer to use your products or services, allowing you to make changes to improve the efficiency of a process and help make it easier for your customers to interact with your organisation. Like CSAT and NPS there is a clear correlation between good customer satisfaction and the success of a business and its revenue growth.
The teams that use CES are often operational and include marketing, product management, sales, and customer service.
Can I combine CES and CSAT or NPS?
Some companies combine CES and other surveys: you can use CES to improve a specific process or element (for example, after an order form or after a service has been carried out) and then use CSAT after customers have used your products and services and lastly you can combine with an NPS survey to provide an overall business metric for the leadership team. If you combine surveys, make sure you do not overload the customer with too many surveys! For example, you might want to limit to just one per month (SightMill provides options to limit how often you send surveys to a contact).
The CES question
The CES survey question asks a customer: "How easy was it for you to resolve your issue with [company-name]?" or for a specific process "How easy was it for you to carry out [task]?"
This one simple question has since been used as the basis of CES surveys and it help discover how easy it was for your customers to carry out a specific process or task.
CES helps you clearly identify processes and tasks that customers find hard to complete and, by asking a second open question ("why did you give this score?") you can discover any problems or issues you need to fix to help improve overall efficiency.
How is CES calculated?
The standard way of asking your customers for feedback is to ask one question "How easy was it for you to resolve your issue with [company-name]?"
The customer answers by choosing a score on a scale from 1 to 7 (1 equals 'not easy' and 7 equals 'very easy').
Now ask the customer the follow-up question "Why did you give this score?"
The customer can answer with a free text comment (often called the verbatim comment).
CES Scoring
- Those scoring 1, 2 or 3 are classed as negative
- Those scoring 4 are classed as neutral
- Those scoring 5, 6 or 7 are classed as positive
Calculation
The CES score is calculated using a simple calculation of the percentage of positive respondents as a pecentage of the total respondents.
Example:
If you have 50 respondents to your survey and 22 score 4 or 5 (ie are satisfied) then your CES score is 44%.
Delivering CES surveys
CES surveys can be delivered to your customers by email, by SMS, on your website, at an event, or entered manually whilst on a telephone call.
Specialist CES software helps you manage the delivery of the surveys, collect the responses, calculate the score and, most importantly, help analyse the trends and show any correlation between the score and the themes in the free text comments or particular groups of customers.
Act on CES feedback
To help solve customer problems and improve customer satisfaction you need to react quickly to any issues raised by CES surveys, allowing you to listen to your customers and communicate effectively with them that you have listened and acted on their comments.
You should look how to improve the experience of those in the negative group and move them up to being positive respondents.
What can you measure using CES?
CES is particularly good for measuring the efficiency of a process or using a service or product from a customer point of view. (In comparison, NPS is great for measuring the entire customer experience and CES is great for making tasks easier for a customer).You can use CSAT to measure the customer feedback about individual products, services, brands, or comparing different customer segments, different elements in a product.
Understand the themes behind CES scores
To help your teams resolve issues and improve product efficiency, you need to know the different themes mentioned by your customers in their answers and compare these to your customer segments or products.
How to use CES in your organisation
By using the SightMill reports you can view responses and scores by segment or product (or geography or price point) and get a clear view of what is behind any customer problems.
Start gathering customer feedback with SightMill and listen to your customers.
Start gathering customer feedback with SightMill and listen to your customers!
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