SaaS companies accomplish this in a multitude of ways, from providing excellent customer service to ensuring their product meets user needs. One key metric that helps SaaS businesses gauge their success in these areas is the Customer Effort Score (CES).

In this article, we’ll explore the importance of CES in the SaaS industry, how it differs from other customer satisfaction metrics, and why reducing customer effort is crucial for long-term success. We’ll also look at real-world examples of companies that have leveraged CES to improve their customer experience and boost retention rates.

Let’s dive in and discover how measuring and optimizing CES can transform your SaaS business.

Understanding Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the amount of effort a customer has to put in to get their issue resolved. The fundamental principle behind CES is simple: the easier it is for customers to do business with you, the more likely they are to continue doing so.

This core customer service KPI is typically measured through surveys that ask people to rate their agreement with statements like, “The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.” Responses are usually on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree), with higher scores meaning customers had to put in less work to get their concerns resolved. CES stands out from other metrics used in customer service through its focus on friction. Slow, dragged-out or otherwise difficult-to-endure experiences impact how buyers perceive a brand, and if an experience is particularly negative, they may choose to stop purchasing from a company altogether. Identifying and addressing points of friction in existing practices allows businesses to proactively mitigate dissatisfaction and churn.

Importance of CES in SaaS

In the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry, the Customer Effort Score (CES) holds particular significance. Here’s why:

User Experience

CES provides actionable insights that can guide improvements across various touchpoints in the customer journey, whether it’s simplifying a checkout process, enhancing self-service options, or improving the clarity of product information. SaaS companies are well-positioned to benefit from this given the complex nature of their offerings and the ongoing relationship they maintain with customers.

Product Usability

SaaS platforms often involve intricate features and workflows. CES can pinpoint areas where users encounter difficulties, enabling companies to refine their user interface, streamline processes, or provide more intuitive navigation.

Continuous Improvement

Unlike traditional software, SaaS products are continuously updated. CES feedback can guide these iterations, ensuring that each update enhances rather than complicates the user experience.

Customer Retention

A large part of the value of CES in the SaaS world lies in its ability to predict future customer behavior. Research has shown that customers who experience high-effort interactions are more likely to churn, while those who have low-effort experiences tend to increase their spending.

Competitive Advantage

The logic is simple: People want to work with businesses that make their lives easier. Customer support teams that turn already frustrating situations into day-ruining ordeals are likely to lose customers to ones capable of efficiently resolving issues. In this sense, CES can almost act as a gauge of how well a company is doing against its benchmarks and those of competitors.

Resource Allocation

For many SaaS companies, poor customer service isn’t purposeful. It’s simply the result of limited resources being spread too thin. CES helps identify where to allocate those resources for maximum impact.

Feedback Loop

CES provides a continuous feedback mechanism. As SaaS products evolve, CES helps ensure that changes are making things easier for users, not more complicated.

How to Measure Customer Effort Score (CES) in SaaS

As mentioned earlier, customer effort score is traditionally calculated through the collection of survey data. While interactions between clients and staff are qualitative, rating scales allow for quantitative analysis. Numerical data can be used to calculate an overall CES score, typically represented as an average of all responses or as a percentage of respondents who gave a high score.

SaaS companies are luckier than others in the sense that serving customers with CES measurement surveys is quite easy. User interfaces simply need to be set up to ask the right people the right questions at the right times. For instance, a survey pop-up might appear after a user completes a key task, such as setting up a new feature or resolving an issue through the help center.

Let’s add some more context to the measurement process by going over its basic steps:

Identify Key Touchpoints

Start by identifying the most critical interactions in the customer journey – i.e. times when customers are likely to encounter friction or require significant effort. Common examples in SaaS include initial product setup, accessing key features, and navigating billing processes.

Design Survey Questions

Craft clear, concise survey questions that accurately measure customer effort. For SaaS products, consider questions like:

• “How easy was it to set up your account?”
• “On a scale of 1-7, how simple was it to use [specific feature]?”
• “How much effort did you have to put in to resolve your issue?”

Ensure questions are relevant to the specific touchpoint and provide actionable insights. Examples of questions that are unlikely to yield actionable insights include:

• “Would you recommend our service to others?”
• “Do you like using our software?”

These questions, while potentially useful for other metrics, don’t specifically address the effort required to use the product or service.

Choose the Right Scale

While the traditional CES uses a 7-point scale, some SaaS companies opt for a 5-point scale for simplicity. Whichever you choose, ensure it’s consistent across all touchpoints and clearly explained to respondents. Consider using emojis or visual cues alongside numerical ratings to make the survey more engaging and easier to understand at a glance.

Implement Measurement Tools

Utilize customer feedback software or integrate survey capabilities into your SaaS platform. In-app surveys, email follow-ups, and chat-based feedback mechanisms can all be independently or collectively used to gather comprehensive feedback.

Set Benchmarks and Goals

All too many SaaS companies get caught up in CES data collection that they forget the reason they’re doing it altogether: to improve team and product performance. Simply aiming high isn’t enough of a plan. Tangible and timely progress requires specific, measurable goals and the regular review of work towards those objectives.

Determine Timing and Frequency

Decide when to present surveys to customers. For SaaS, this could be immediately after completing a task, at regular intervals during product usage, or after customer support interactions. Balance gathering sufficient data with avoiding survey fatigue.

Automate Response Triggers

Set up automated workflows that trigger specific actions based on CES responses. For instance, a low score might prompt an immediate follow-up from the customer success team or trigger the creation of a support ticket.

Contextualize Results

Aside from friction and effort, expectations, product complexity, and industry standards can influence CES results. A seemingly high-effort task might be acceptable if it’s industry standard or if the outcome is particularly valuable to the user.

Combine CES Data With Other Insights

It’s important to remember that CES is just one piece of the puzzle. Combining it with customer health score, Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) can provide a more comprehensive view of customer experience.

Conduct Qualitative Follow-Ups

Quantitative data is great for setting benchmarks and urging teams to consistently outdo themselves. Yet qualitative feedback still has lots of value as well. For particularly high or low scores, consider conducting in-depth interviews or focus groups to gain deeper insights into the reasons behind these scores.

Interpreting CES Data

Hopefully, by now, we’ve established the basics of interpreting CES data: up is good and down is bad. However, gleaning meaningful insights requires a lot more thought. Customer service managers often look at scores holistically and granularly to identify patterns. Sometimes, trends in one particular segment of a customer base are the root cause of broader issues. Other times, specific touchpoints are causing disproportionate amounts of friction.

It’s best to start by calculating the average CES across all touchpoints to get a high-level view of customer effort. This provides a baseline for comparison over time and against industry benchmarks. From there, you can conduct a touchpoint-specific analysis. Breaking down CES by individual moments often reveals specific pain points in the customer journey. For instance, a low CES for the account creation process might indicate a cumbersome sign-up flow, while a high CES for customer support interactions could suggest efficient problem resolution. For touchpoints with consistently low CES, conduct in-depth investigations to understand the underlying causes. It’s one thing to know that there’s a problem and another to know how to fix it.

Segmentation is another powerful tool in your CES analysis toolkit. Different user segments (e.g., new vs. long-term customers, different pricing tiers, or usage levels) may have unique experiences at each stage of the customer journey. If one particularly valuable segment is experiencing higher effort, it could signal a need for targeted improvements. Analyzing CES data through this lens helps prioritize efforts where they’ll have the most impact.

Trend analysis allows you to identify patterns, seasonal fluctuations, and the impact of implemented changes over time. While you’ll need a good data analysis tool to visualize these trends effectively, the principles remain the same. Look for significant changes in CES over time, especially after implementing new features or processes. Are scores improving gradually? Did a recent update cause a sudden drop? These insights can help you gauge the success of your efforts and identify areas that need attention. Remember, CES isn’t just about numbers on a chart. It’s about understanding the human experience behind those numbers. Combine your quantitative analysis with qualitative feedback to get the full picture. Customer comments can provide context and specific examples that bring your CES data to life.

Strategies to Improve CES in SaaS

Considering the amount of time invested into measuring CES, it’s only logical to want to derive as much value from it as possible. The most valuable output for most SaaS companies is the reason for conducting this analysis altogether, which is performance.

To that end, let’s explore some effective strategies for improving CES in SaaS environments.

Simplify Processes

Complexity is the enemy of lofty CES. That’s why it’s important to regularly audit workflows and journeys in search of things that can be streamlined or eliminated. Reducing the number of steps required to complete a task, simplifying user interfaces, or automating business processes are just a few examples.

Enhance Self-Service Options

Empowering users to find solutions independently is a powerful way to improve CES. Invest in comprehensive knowledge bases, FAQs, video tutorials, and community forums. These resources will allow users to quickly find answers without needing to contact support, thereby reducing the effort and potential frustration they experience upon facing an issue.

Optimize Onboarding

First impressions matter. A smooth, intuitive onboarding process sets the tone for the entire customer experience. Creating step-by-step guides, interactive tutorials, and personalized onboarding paths takes extra work but can make a significant difference in user adoption and satisfaction.

Consider implementing:

• Interactive product tours
• Personalized onboarding paths based on user roles or goals
• Progress tracking to motivate users through the onboarding process
• In-app tooltips and guidance for key features
• Regular check-ins to ensure users are progressing smoothly

Leverage AI and Automation

It may soon be considered a competitive disadvantage to not leverage AI in your SaaS product. AI and automation have the potential to significantly reduce customer effort by providing instant, 24/7 customer support. Advanced solutions offer predictive search and autocomplete features capable of proactively identifying and resolving potential issues before they impact users. At the very least research AI-powered solutions for your specific use case.

Case Studies and Real-World Examples

Want some real-world examples to see how customer feedback tools can transform businesses? These case studies showcase how real companies have leveraged customer feedback to skyrocket their success:

Blueberry Markets

Blueberry Markets, a trading company founded in 2016, identified a gap in the industry where competitors offered competitive spreads but poor customer service. To address this, they made excellent customer service a cornerstone of their business model. The service team implemented a comprehensive customer feedback system that integrates with their support ticketing tool. This new system would measure three key satisfaction metrics: Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Their funnel-like process starts when customers receive a CSAT survey immediately after their support ticket is closed. If a customer reports dissatisfaction, the case is reopened for further attention. The company then monitors changes in the customer’s experience through CES, followed by an NPS survey a few days later.

This approach enables Blueberry Markets to continuously assess and improve their customer service, which includes 24/7 phone support, email support within 30 minutes, and live chat support with less than five-second response times.

Man Crates

Gift company Man Crates faced challenges with its existing customer feedback system, which didn’t provide comprehensive insights into customer effort and satisfaction. The company sought a more effective tool to capture both customer effort and agent performance. Their main goals were to gauge how easily customers could resolve issues and to gather more efficient feedback on their service quality.

Their new solution allowed them to implement Customer Effort Score (CES) measurements alongside traditional Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) metrics for a more holistic view of the customer experience. The company now gathers much more valuable feedback on their products and services directly from customers, while also using the data to improve agent performance and address recurring issues more efficiently.

Conclusion

The effort you put into reducing the amount of effort your customers need to expend can yield significant returns. Ease of use can be a major differentiator in the SaaS space, where customers have numerous options at their fingertips. By focusing on reducing customer effort, you’re not just improving satisfaction – you’re creating a competitive advantage that can set your product apart in a crowded market.

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