To make your company truly customer-centric, you must decide for once and for all that you want to give your customers a central position within your organization. This means that you are not only going to listen to your customers’ feedback, but you will also implement the necessary improvements based on it.
NPS vs CES
Many organizations are familiar with the process of the day-to-day tracking of customer feedback, using it to make the voice of their customers be heard throughout their organization.
Most likely, these organizations are using Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a KPI to track the experience of their customers with their organization, product, service, or brand. The problem is, however, that unfortunately the NPS is not suitable for measuring all the interactions a customer might have.
After all, customer experience is a comprehensive phenomenon made up of all the possible steps and stages of the customer journey. In this journey, the customer may encounter a problem with a product or service or have a complaint about the quality of the customer service.
It makes little sense to measure the experience of a customer with a negative aspect such as a complaint, by asking to what extent they would recommend the company to others. In cases like that, the Customer Effort Score can do the trick.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
The Customer Effort Score (CES) is a customer-oriented KPI that focuses on how much effort customers feel they must put forth to have their problem solved. So, the main issue in the CES score is how easy you can make your customer’s life when they have a question or a complaint.
Customer Effort Score question
How much effort did you personally have to put forth to have your question answered?
Measuring CES as well as NPS
Make sure to use the right KPI for the right process. It is impossible to use the CES to create an overall impression of the customer experience. But as a supporting KPI to NPS, for example, it can be extremely helpful.
This means that when you start to measure, track, and analyze, it is important that you use a Customer Experience solution that does not only allow you to use two metrics alongside one another. But it should also recognize at which stage of the customer journey your customer is and adjust the metric accordingly. Measure NPS in case of a purchase or subscription and CES in case of complaints, for example.