The Customer Effort Score (CES) is a customer-oriented KPI that gives you insight about a customer's experience during their customer journey. The original Customer Effort Score (CES) is based on a scale from 1 to 5. However, due to some criticism as many thought that the original CES was framed too negatively, a new version of the CES was created, known as CES 2.0.
The CES 2.0 took a new run at the question format by getting respondents to evaluate a statement on a scale of 1 to 7. This allows you to pose a type question such as “[company name] made it easy for me to handle my issue.” The scale is preset and runs from 1 to 7, where 1 stands for extremely difficult and seven for extremely easy.
On the basis of their given scores, respondents are divided into three groups.
(Extremely) easy respondents : The percentage of respondents that answered 6 or 7
Neutral respondents: The percentage of respondents that answered 4 or 5
(Extremely) difficult respondents: The percentage of respondents that answered 1, 2 or 3.
Calculation:
Our CX software supports multiple methods of calculating the CES 2.0. Nonetheless, this article explains in-depth the calculation method CES 7-point scale to index. If you prefer to use the calculation format CES 7-point scale to average, please click here.
For the CES 7-point scale to index calculation, you take the percentage of (extremely) easy respondents and you deduct the percentage of (extremely) difficult respondents from them. The result is displayed as an absolute score, not a percentage, varying between -100 and +100. The higher the CES, the less effort customers have had to make to be helped.
The formula is:
Customer Effort Score (CES) = % (Extremely) easy - % (Extremely) difficult
An example:
You have conducted the Customer Effort Research with your customers and you have 1000 responses. They can be divided in the following groups:
570 out of 1000 (57%) of the responses are a 6 or 7
190 out of 1000 (19%) of the responses are a 4 or 5
220 out of 1000 (22%) of the responses are a 1, 2 or 3
You now take the percentage of (very) little effort customers (57%) and you deduct the percentage of (very) much effort customers (22%). This leads to an Customer Effort Score of +35.
Please note: this calculations is applied to the records that meet the requirements that you have set in your period selection, your filter selection and the default selection for available records for reporting.