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In the competitive landscape of modern business, understanding customer experience (CX) has become more crucial than ever. Companies are increasingly leveraging customer experience metrics to gain insights into their customers’ needs and preferences. Among these metrics, Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Net Promoter Score (NPS) stand out as essential tools for measuring and enhancing customer interactions. This blog will delve into each of these metrics, exploring how they can unlock deeper insights and drive business success.
The Power of Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES measures how much effort customers have to expend to accomplish their goals when interacting with a company. The premise is simple: the easier it is for customers to use a product or get support, the higher the retention rates.
Why CES Works:
- Customers scoring high on effort are 4x more likely to churn than those reporting low effort.
- The correlation between CES and retention is stronger than both NPS and CSAT.
- Data shows that customers scoring 6-7 on CES maintain a 92% retention rate, compared to only 41% for those scoring 1-2.
The Complementary Role of CSAT and NPS
While CES is a strong predictor of retention, CSAT and NPS offer valuable insights into overall customer satisfaction and likelihood to recommend:
- CSAT provides immediate feedback on specific interactions or experiences.
- NPS indicates long-term loyalty and the potential for customer advocacy.
Unlocking Deeper Insights by Integrating CES, CSAT, and NPS
The true power of these metrics emerges when they are used in conjunction:
- Holistic View: Combining CES, CSAT, and NPS provides a 360-degree view of the customer lifecycle journey, from initial interactions to long-term loyalty.
- Contextual Understanding: Integrating these metrics with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data adds crucial context, allowing businesses to segment customers based on their history, value, and specific needs.
- Predictive Power: Incorporating CSAT and NPS along with CES can help identify potential brand advocates and areas for improvement in overall satisfaction.
Guidance on Approach for Different Needs/Companies
To ensure that businesses of all types can benefit from CES, CSAT, and NPS, it’s important to provide guidance on selecting the right approach. The integration of these metrics can vary depending on the company’s size, industry, and customer lifecycle. Whether you are a B2B SaaS company or an e-commerce platform, understanding which metric to prioritize at each stage of the customer journey is essential. SurveyVista can help businesses automate and align their surveys to best match their needs, ensuring effective data collection and actionable insights.
Practical Application
Use Case 1: E-commerce Platform
Consider a scenario where an e-commerce platform wants to improve its overall customer experience and increase repeat purchases.
- CSAT: After each purchase, the platform sends a CSAT survey asking customers to rate their satisfaction with the product quality and checkout process. This helps identify specific touchpoints that may need improvement.
- CES: The platform also measures CES by asking customers how easy it was to navigate the website and complete their purchase. This metric highlights any friction points in the shopping experience.
- NPS: Finally, the platform conducts an NPS survey a few weeks after the purchase, asking customers how likely they are to recommend the site to friends. This helps gauge long-term loyalty and satisfaction.
By analyzing the data from all three metrics, the e-commerce platform identifies that while customers are satisfied with product selection (high CSAT), they find the checkout process cumbersome (low CES). As a result, they streamline the checkout process, leading to improved NPS scores and increased repeat visits.
Use Case 2: SaaS Company
A Software as a Service (SaaS) company aims to enhance user onboarding and retention.
- CSAT: After onboarding sessions, users receive a CSAT survey to evaluate their satisfaction with the training materials and support provided.
- CES: The company measures CES by asking users how easy it was to set up their accounts and start using the software. This helps identify barriers in the onboarding experience.
- NPS: Periodically, the company sends out an NPS survey to assess overall customer loyalty and likelihood of recommending the service to others.
Outcome: The analysis reveals that users feel satisfied with training (high CSAT) but struggle with account setup (low CES). Consequently, the company invests in improving onboarding resources and support, resulting in higher NPS scores as users become more engaged and willing to recommend the service.
Consider a software company implementing this integrated approach:
- CES reveals struggles with the onboarding process
- CSAT shows high satisfaction with customer support
- NPS indicates moderate likelihood to recommend
- CRM data shows higher lifetime value for long-term customers
By analyzing these metrics together, the company might discover that:
- Improving the onboarding process could significantly boost retention and NPS scores
- High-value customers who overcome initial hurdles become strong advocates
- Targeted support during onboarding for specific customer segments could yield the highest ROI
Strengthening the Process with SurveyVista
The value of CES, CSAT, and NPS doesn’t lie just in collecting data but in the entire process: collecting, centralizing, understanding, and acting on the feedback. SurveyVista is designed to support this holistic process, enabling businesses to centralize survey responses in one place, understand the insights in the context of their CRM data, and act swiftly to drive improvements.
| Ask this | To inform this |
|---|---|
| COLLECT | |
| What are the main touchpoints on the customer’s journey? | When should we seek feedback? |
| At each touchpoint, what matters most to the customer? | What should we be asking the customer about? |
| How does the customer like to interact at this touchpoint? | What channels should we use to collect feedback? |
| INTEGRATE | |
| What transactional and operational data and metrics are the feedback related to? | What do we need to associate feedback data with to improve insights? Which systems do we need to integrate our survey data with? |
| How does feedback relate to the people and companies we serve? | What records should include feedback data? |
| How do we ensure people can see a complete picture of feedback received? | What and how do we share feedback with colleagues? |
| UNDERSTAND | |
| How does the feedback we are receiving impact our financial performance? | What is the relationship between survey content and our operating and financial metrics? |
| What do different groups of customers tell us in their surveys? | What issues are universal or segment/cohort specific? |
| ACT | |
| Who needs to know what customers want? | What action triggers do we need to set up? Who is responsible for actioning different aspects of feedback? |
| What do customers expect after providing feedback? | How do we close the loop with customers on specific and general points? Who is responsible for actioning this? |
| Which actions will have the greatest positive impact on customers and our company? | Which actions should we prioritize? |
Implementation Strategies
- Start small: Integrate Metrics into the Customer Journey. Map key touchpoints for feedback and automate surveys after significant interactions.
- Keep Surveys Contextual: Ensure surveys are timely and relevant to the customer’s recent experience.
- Act Quickly: Address negative scores within 24 hours to show responsiveness and commitment to improvement.
- Share Insights Across Teams: Ensure product, support, and success teams have access to and act upon the collected data.
- Track Trends: Focus on trends over time rather than just absolute scores to identify areas of improvement and measure the impact of changes.
- Communicate Changes Based on Feedback: Inform customers about changes made from their feedback and share successes internally to motivate teams.
Collect, Integrate, Understand, Act
Whatever feedback methodology you use, and SurveyVista supports all of them, remember that collecting the data is only the start of a four part feedback process.
Collect: The key here is to make it easy and relevant. Easy means the fewest possible, unambiguous questions; great look and feel that reflects your brand and a choice of channels for customers to provide their feedback. Relevant means it’s personalized, relates specifically to their experience and issued in a timely manner.
Integrate: Customer sentiment is an important data set but becomes massively more powerful when integrated with other data. People across the organization can see the feedback and adjust their actions accordingly. Integrating data allows patterns between feedback and operational and revenue performance to be explored.
Understand: Feedback provides an outside-in view of how your organization is performing and thereby the opportunity to build deeper insights, especially with its integration with other data. The key is to understand both the immediate implications of feedback, especially when it is negative, and the root causes, which helps design impactful solutions.
Act: This is the most important part of any survey program. Taking action is where you get the return on your feedback program and show customers their views are important. This is where you improve the effectiveness of your processes, address product and service weaknesses and, most importantly, strengthen your relationship with customers. Remember also that customers need to know that they have been heard and that is best demonstrated by what you do, not just what you say!
SurveyVista and its powerful integration with Salesforce is purposefully designed to deliver on all four stages and exploit the survey method you choose. If you want expert help in building a winning feedback process, whatever approach you use, we’d be happy to help!
