Customer experience and satisfaction are central measures these days. Many analysis tools exist and indeed, one can quickly get lost among the solutions offered. The most commonly proposed solutions are the NPS ® vs CES. Both of them provide information about how customers feel about your company, your products and your services. However, there are nuances to choosing which one is the best for your business objectives.
What is NPS ® (Net Promoter Score ®)
Before entering into details, let’s make a quick refresh. NPS ® stands for Net Promoter Score ® and is the easiest way to measure customer loyalty. NPS ® can be an indicator of future growth for your business because of its correlation with customer loyalty. Many companies internationally have widely adopted NPS ® (Net Promoter Score ®). You’ve probably come across an NPS ® in your life, the typical NPS ® question is “How likely is it – on a scale of 0 to 10 – that you would recommend our customer service to a friend or colleague?“
What is CES (Customer Effort Score)
CES or Customer Effort Score is a transactional survey and measures distinct customer experiences with your company. CES surveys are triggered by specific interactions and processes between the customer and the company. The CES measures the ease with which a company allows its customers to interact with its products and services on a scale of 1 to 7. It measures the “effort a customer has to put in” to solve a problem, buy/return a product or answer a question. As you can see, this score is very important because a product that is easy to use will bring in and retain more customers.
NPS ® vs CES: which one is the best?
People widely use both NPS ® (Net Promoter Score) and CES (Customer Effort Score) as customer satisfaction metrics, but they measure different aspects of the customer experience.
NPS ® measures customer loyalty and measures the likelihood of a customer recommending a product or service to others. NPS ® has a score on a scale of 0 to 10, with higher scores indicating higher customer loyalty. CES, on the other hand, measures the effort a customer has to put into getting an issue resolved or achieving a goal. CES has a score on a scale of 0 to 5 and the lowest scores indicate less effort.
The “best” metric depends on the company’s goals and objectives and the specific customer experience they want to measure. NPS ® is better for measuring brand advocacy and customer loyalty, while CES is better for measuring customer experience with a specific interaction or process. The “best” metric depends on the company’s goals and obBoth NPS® (Net Promoter Score®) and CES (Customer Effort Score) can provide valuable insights.
So, should I use CES vs. NPS ® as a customer metric?
In fact, it really depends on your needs and objectives. First, set your goals. What do you really need to know about your customers? What are the metrics you want to analyse? Do you need to go deep into details or more like a general overview? Knowing exactly what you’re looking for is essential before implementing any customer satisfaction metric into your system. You will gain time and energy and results will improve your business customer satisfaction results.
Using Net Promoter Score ® (NPS ®) as a customer metric
NPS ® measures customer loyalty and the likelihood of a customer to recommend your product or service to others. We calculate the NPS ® (Net Promoter Score®) by asking customers “How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?” and evaluating their response on a scale of 0 to 10. They end up in 3 groups: Promoters (score from 9-10), Passives (score from 7-8), and Detractors (score from 0-6). Then, you calculate NPS ® by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
Use NPS ® as a valuable indicator to measure overall customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, to gain a more complete understanding of the customer experience, it’s best to use NPS ® (Net Promoter Score®) in conjunction with other indicators.
Using Customer Effort Score (CES) as a customer metric
We measure the Customer Effort Score (CES) by assessing the effort a customer puts in to resolve their problem or attain their goal. We do this by asking the question “How much effort did you personally have to make to deal with your request?” and evaluating their response on a scale of 0 to 5 to calculate the CES. When the score is low (close to 0), this indicates less effort on the part of your customer and therefore a positive outcome. The CES can be a valuable measure for evaluating interactions with your customers or specific processes in your business. It can help you identify areas where you can improve and avoid friction to improve the customer experience.
Monitor & track all your results
So, as you will have understood, both NPS ® and CES provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction, but it’s important to use both metrics together to get a comprehensive understanding of how customers perceive a company’s product or service. Additionally, it’s important to regularly monitor and track these metrics over time to identify trends and make improvements. If you need some help on improving customer satisfaction in your business, don’t hesitate to ask our experts.