A smooth and effortless onboarding process is critical to customer success.
Yet, onboarding is multi-faceted. The first touches on the customer journey can be a mix of product, people, and processes, adding to the complexity of the task.
For that reason, it can be difficult to know what to prioritize, how to improve, and even where to start.
While NPS and CSAT are essential to a solid Voice of the Customer Program, Customer Effort Score (CES) has proven to be the best CX metric to measure onboarding success.
4. The modern platform for boosting customer happiness
NPS | CSAT | CES | Text Analytics
5. Why the focus on onboarding?
The first impression!
Seeds of retention -- or churn -- are laid here.
Onboarding is multi-faceted
The first touches in the journey could be a mix of product, people, process. So many things
you could create and improve.
But improvement is hard!
• a major cross-functional overhaul is time-consuming
• difficult to know what to prioritize
• onboarding feedback moments are either not institutionalized or they are over-
engineered
6. What we’ll cover today
• Intro to CES
• Why “ease”
• A practical example
• Best practices on deployment
• NPS and CES working together
7. What is CES (customer effort?)
Customer Effort Score is:
• on a 1-7 scale
• reported as a simple mean average
8. Why Effort?
CEB/Gartner’s study showed:
• Effortless/ease was the only meaningful attribute of satisfaction when
evaluating a process, task or action
• In fact, CES was 25%more predictive of loyalty than the next best metric!
9. Why effort?
“You need to give your customers
fewer reasons to be disloyal, and the
best way to make that happen is to
reduce customer effort.”
– Matthew Dixon “The Effortless Experience”
10. Why CES for onboarding?
Reducing friction is key to successful onboarding!
• People! Customer Success
• Documentation, Help Centers, user flow
• Experience…did we keep our promise?
11. Customers love it!
• Relevant
• Short
• Conveys investment in their success
You’ll love it!
• Specific
• Actionable
• You’ll be surprised at what you learn…
Why CES for onboarding?
13. Wootric on Wootric: Our CES story
Why we wanted CES:
• the business was getting more complex
• rapid intro of product features
• A focused question vs. NPS
Our process:
• Auto-triggered email survey through Intercom
14. Wootric on Wootric: Our CES story
Responses shared out broadly:
• Dedicated CES slack channel for company wide
visibility
• Pumped into Salesforce to enhance customer
records
Loop closed for critical feedback:
• Conversations opened in Intercom to speed up
replies
Sales /
System of Record
Support/Success
Action
Company
Visibility
15. Wootric on Wootric: Our CES learning
High Response Rates!
• 20% took the survey
• 50% of those left detailed comments
The data was specific and actionable.
• Strengths: loved the team and overall
usability of the product
• Big Opportunity: our documentation was
creating friction.
Our Wootric CES dashboard highlighted areas of focus:
16. What we’ve done to improve the experience:
• Institutionalized and prioritized documentation updates
• Revamped our onboarding guide
Wootric on Wootric: Our actions
17. Net Net:
• We surfaced specific feedback that NPS did not catch
• CES is up!
Wootric on Wootric: Our Results
18. More CES examples
• Improving Support interactions (email or SMS)
• Inside documentation pages (in-app)
• Feature flow completion (in-app)
20. Best Practices: Getting started
Three key considerations:
1. What is the critical milestone that will be connected to the survey?
2. Who gets this survey?
2. What is the best channel for this survey?
21. Best Practices: Closing the loop
Share this metric!
• Who will benefit? Socialize it to improve transparency.
Treat this with as much urgency as NPS.
• Have a workflow for quickly responding to negative feedback.
• This is your first true ‘success’ feedback moment. Are you on track?
• Testimonials could be relevant here too!
22. CES + NPS Levels up your CX Game
CES and NPS can and do work together!
• CES is your point in time metric for a very specific, critical milestone.
• NPS is your recurring health check on the customer’s happiness.
CES helps tee you up for a better NPS outcome (if you manage it!)
• You will get more powerful results with both in your measurement toolkit.
Now you’re on the path to understanding your customer’s journey.
23. The Wrap
Take a quick CES pulse after onboarding!
• Start Simple, Get Quick Wins!
• Get early feedback that’s immediately actionable
• Kick off your customer relationship in a collaborative way
• Let customers help you prioritize improvements, and highlight your
strengths