Introducing the Employee Effort Score (EES)

Employee centricity in a customer-centric era

In many organisations, customer advocacy has recently become a hot topic in the boardroom and respective teams are looking into the possibilities to increase customer experience. However, what about your employees? Shouldn’t you be looking at their experience as well? Nonetheless, they are the ones delivering your customer’s experience.  

Your employees play a vital role in the overall customer journey

Designing exceptional customer experiences requires understanding and overcoming the challenges faced by employees in delivering those experiences. After all, it's not just businesses that innovate and serve, it's the people within them.

From sales to operations and support, every employee plays a vital role in the overall customer journey, and their daily performance directly affects the customer experience. By prioritising employee engagement and centricity, businesses can create happier employees who are more motivated to deliver exceptional experiences to customers.

Don’t believe us? Research by Harvard Business Review has shown a direct link between employee and customer satisfaction, the so called ‘service profit chain’.  

Is it possible to measure employee engagement and track it like we do for customer engagement through metrics such as CSAT, NPS, and CES? And more importantly, should we measure it? You can probably already guess... yes! Our viewpoint is that employee engagement should be measured similarly to customer engagement, and the metrics should be linked.

There are numerous resources available that explain customer metrics, including our blog post on the correlation between eNPS and NPS. Let's explore whether we can apply the same approach to CES (Customer Effort Score) versus Employee Effort Score, which can be referred to as EES.

The Employee Effort Score (EES)

Have you heard about CES (Customer Effort Score)? It's a metric gaining traction in organisations alongside NPS and CSAT. It measures the level of effort a customer has to put in to complete a task, whether it's purchasing a product, resolving an issue, or something else entirely. If you’re not familiar with CES, it’s a metric created by Gartner, based on the following questions, using a verbal scale from 1 (very difficult) to 7 (very easy).

Through their research, Gartner discovered that customer loyalty depends on how easy you make it for customers to do business with you. 

Coming back to what we previously mentioned, creating an employee experience is therefore a first step towards delivering a customer experience that is both profitable and sustainable. One of the main pillars defining employee experience is the effort they need to put in to execute their jobs, as in what hinders them to do their jobs in an efficient manner?

Consider asking yourself the following questions to find out how you can make it easier for your employees to execute their job: 

• What’s keeping employees from delivering the great experience that your customers deserve?
• How can we simplify workflows and processes?
• What complexities, organisation structures, complications, and bureaucracy do we need to optimise or even remove?
• How can we become easier to do business with – internally
• How do we reduce effort for employees and then, ultimately, for customers?

Introducing the Employee Effort Score

When we make it difficult for employees to do their jobs, it translates to the experience they deliver for their customers. Even if the task the employee is trying to do is not directly related to a customer and his experience, the frustration that effort evokes will manifest itself in the employee-customer experience somehow. We should ask employees a variation of the CES question, namely the EES or Employee Effort Score. It’s a metric used to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of employees executing their job.

Typically, we recommend to leave a comment field on top and perform text mining and sentiment analysis on it to get insights in comments and helps you understand what you can improve to influence EES.

Why EES is important for continuous improvement of your organisation

While typical employee engagement surveys measure a general level of satisfaction, there’s no further definition of “satisfaction”. Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) clearly focuses on building a group of positively tuned promoters within the organisation. However, neither of these two metrics provides accurate insight into a service or process shortcomings.

EES instantly incorporates employees’ feedback into the process of continuous improvement. Any EES feedback directly refers to a specific process or customer interaction.

The underlying principle is that employees will be more engaged, when they can do their jobs more efficiently and productively, focusing on real customer-added value. 

Although employee effort is one of the elements influencing employee engagement, it is not the only one. Are you looking to improve your employee experience and drive employee engagement? Discover our mini guide with practical tips & tricks to get started!