Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that measures the amount of effort a customer has to put in to use your product or service. It is typically measured on a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 7, with 1 being "very easy" and 5/7 being "very difficult". Users are asked to rate the level of effort they experienced while performing a particular task. The final UES is calculated by averaging the individual effort ratings provided by users.
As a product manager, CES is an important metric to track because it can help you understand how easy or difficult your product is to use. A high CES score indicates that your customers are having a lot of trouble using your product, which can lead to churn and dissatisfaction. A low CES score, on the other hand, indicates that your customers are finding your product easy to use, which can lead to increased adoption and loyalty.
Importance for Product Managers
- User-Centric Design: UES empowers you to design user-centric products by uncovering pain points and areas of friction in the user journey. It helps you identify where users are struggling and where improvements can be made to streamline their interactions.
- Performance Tracking: UES serves as a valuable key performance indicator (KPI) that you can track over time. It allows you to gauge the impact of design changes, feature updates, or optimizations on the overall user experience.
- Benchmarking and Comparison: By monitoring UES, you can benchmark your product's performance against industry standards or competitors' products. This helps you understand how your product stacks up and where you might need to differentiate.
- Prioritization: As a product manager, you're often faced with limited resources and competing priorities. UES helps you prioritize your efforts by highlighting the tasks or features that have the highest user effort scores, indicating where the most significant improvements can be made.
- User Satisfaction: While other metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) focus on overall satisfaction, UES narrows in on the specific effort users expend. By reducing user effort, you enhance satisfaction and increase the likelihood of user retention and advocacy.
How to implement the User Effort Score metric
- Survey Design: Create targeted surveys or feedback forms that ask users to rate the effort required to complete specific tasks. Keep the questions simple, focused, and relevant to the user's recent interaction.
- Segmentation: Segment users based on their roles, behavior, or demographics. This helps you identify whether effort levels vary among different user groups, enabling you to tailor improvements accordingly.
- Feedback Loop: Establish a feedback loop to ensure that user effort data is consistently collected and analyzed. Regularly review and analyze the UES data to identify trends and actionable insights.
- Qualitative Insights: Combine UES with qualitative insights from user interviews or usability testing to gain a deeper understanding of the reasons behind high or low effort scores.
- Continuous Improvement: Use UES as a guide for iterative design and development. Make incremental changes and measure their impact on the user experience.
