Customer Effort Score (CES) Surveys help you measure how your customers feel about the amount of effort it took for them to interact with your product or company.

Like NPS, these surveys are standardized. CES Surveys typically ask this question:

"Overall, how easy was your experience interacting with (Company/Brand)?"

This is the recommended and default question in ChurnZero CES Surveys, but you can customize if desired.

Calculating CES

CES Surveys give the survey taker a scale of responses ranging from 1 to 7. Customer Effort Score is simply measured as the average rating of all responses.

Note: The Account CES calculation does not include Responses that were submitted over 12 months before the most recent Response

For example, if the most recent response for an account is on 1/31/21 -- a response from 1/15/20 would not be factored in to the Account CES

Create your CES Campaign

To begin creating a new CES Campaign, select "Drafts" under Surveys from the main Navigation Bar. This will take you to a list of all of your inactive Surveys. Then click Crate New Survey > CES Survey

Survey Settings

This is where you configure the basic settings for your CES Campaign.

• On/Off - This controls if your CES Survey is running (i.e. actively processing contacts) or Off/Paused (i.e. not processing contacts). We recommend leaving your plays OFF until they are completely ready. Switching the play to ON should be the last action you take to activate a campaign. Additionally, at any point you can turn an active CES campaign to OFF, causing all contacts to pause where they are in the flow. No additional contacts will be added to the campaign and contacts within the CES campaign will not progress through any more steps.

• Name - The name of your CES Campaign will distinguish it on the Active Surveys page. It is also the name that will show in the drop-down when selecting a campaign to run manually for a contact . Make sure your plan names are clear but concise, so they are easy to recognize.

• Description - The description of your CES Campaign allows you to elaborate on the purpose of the Survey.

• Type of Campaign
  • Periodic - This is a way to set up a recurring survey that sends to your customers on a regular basis.
    • Recurring - This indicates how often people who are in this campaign will be resurveyed. For example, you might set this at Every 6 Months so the same contact is only surveyed again 6 months after they have taken the initial survey
    • Drip Rate - Surveys can either be sent all at once to everyone in a segment, or they can be dripped. For example, you can Drip over 3 Months, meaning that every day a small percentage of people in the selected segments are surveyed.
  • On Segment Entry - This means that a contact will be surveyed when they enter a contact or account segment. There is no drip rate option for this one, so all contacts will be surveyed immediately upon entry.
• Segments - Next you need to choose which contacts will be associated to your campaign. This is done through Segments. Choose which Segments you want associated to this specific campaign
• Day To Send - Choose Business days only or any Calendar day. Note that this setting dictates how wait times are calculated for your Reminders (if applicable -- see Reminders section below)
• Time to Send - The time you want to send the survey to the contact.
• Timezone - The timezone in relation to your "Time To Send".
• Unsubscribe Link in Emails - If you want surveys sent via email to include an unsubscribe message +  link, this setting should be ON. It is a Campaign-level setting, meaning all email surveys from that Campaign (initial + reminders) will or will not include the unsubscribe message + link based on this setting. 
  • If ON, ChurnZero will automatically include the same unsubscribe message + link that is used in emails that are marked as Type = Marketing in Playbooks. 

You can customize some elements of this message and link under Admin > Email Settings. 

• If a contact unsubscribes from a CES email, their "Marketing Email Status" will be updated to "Unsubscribed". This same attribute is updated by unsubscribes from Marketing emails. In other words, when a contact unsubscribes from a CES email or a Marketing email, they will no longer receive CES surveys via email nor Marketing emails. 
• IMPORTANT: The ability to unsubscribe is specific to email; contacts cannot unsubscribe from in-app content or surveys. If your CES Campaign includes surveys via email and in-app, unsubscribing will only remove them from email surveys. They WILL still receive in-app surveys. 
  • If you also don't want contacts to receive in-app surveys if they unsubscribe, you'll need to include Marketing Email Status = Subscribed as a filter in the Segment(s) controlling your CES Campaign. 

You will have two options for how to distribute your survey, In-App Announcement or Email.

In-App Announcement

Send surveys to your clients right within your own application!

• Decide how the Survey will display (pop up, slider, or in Success Panel Only).
• Choose the displayed Sender. This can be a selected ChurnZero Account User, or personalize it to come from an Account Role (i.e The Account's Customer Success Manager or Owner).
• Set how much time should pass before an unanswered survey expires.
• Your Global In-App Announcement Style Settings will apply to your in-app survey.

Email

This option allows you to send out the Survey via an email. Select if you want use a branded template for the email, the email subject line, as well as who you want the email to come from.

Add Reminders

Determine if you want to include any Reminders. A reminder is meant to go out some time after the initial survey as a means to increase the likelihood that the survey will be responded to. Reminders can be both In-App Announcements and Email.

Note: Reminder wait times count days -- and ultimately send on days -- in accordance to the setting you choose in the Day to Send field (described above)