Customer Effort Score (CES)

With time and the general improvement in data and technology, the KPIs being used to measure customer loyalty have evolved. One such metric is Customer Effort Score.

Starting with a simple survey, this metric gauges whether the experience a customer had with a company (or general customer experience, CX) has been easy or heavy on effort. This is traditionally done using a 7 point scale.

At ElevateSX, instead of relying on surveys which don’t even have a 25% response rate, we calculate the CES on every ticket, every interaction of a customer, using the wealth of ticket data that we have.

How is CES calculated?

As mentioned, this is done at a ticket level so that every interaction that a customer has, is factored into the calculation on a case-to-case basis. We use a scale of 100, with 100 being the best (least effort) and 0 being the worst (highest effort) scores.

1. We identify and look for the factors/contributors to “effort” in a ticket.

List of Factors/Contributors to Customer Effort:

No. of Agent Comments 

No. of Customer Comments 

Customer to Agent Comment Ratio

First Contact Resolution 

Time to First Contact 

Time to Closing 

Respond within timeframe 

Channel Transfer 

People Transfer 

Successful Resolution 

Anger

Negativity 

Hold Time 

Wait Time (Pre-Agent Hold Time) 

Escalation Requests

Repetition

Note - Based on the channel of the ticket (voice, email etc.), some factors may or may not apply.

2. Once we’ve identified which of the above criteria are applicable, we assign a score based on the quantum of each of the above criteria (CES Factor Score). The score assigned is on a three-factor scale as below:

• Easy – 5 points
• Neutral – 3 points
• Difficult – 1 point

Finally, we then take a percentage of the total CES Factor score each ticket gets against the Max Ticket score.

Ticket CES = 100 * (Sum of all CES Factors) / (Max Ticket Score)

Overall CES (CES for a person/team/organisation) = (Sum of all Ticket CES) / Total No. of Tickets

Examples: