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Effort (Discover)

About Effort

CB Effort is a pre-made enrichment that measures the effort it took a customer to complete a task. Effort is calculated at a sentence level on a -5 to 5 scale (using only whole, non-zero numbers) and can be divided into 3 or 5 scale segments to group feedback into: Very Hard, Hard, Neutral, Easy, and Very Easy.

You can use the effort score to understand issues that could affect customer loyalty. Design solutions that make it easier for customers to interact with your products or services.

Example: Here’s some customer feedback on a website, and what the effort scores might be.

Very hard: Your website is impossible to navigate!
Hard: Your website is frustrating.
Neutral: Your website is ugly!
Easy: Your website is easy to use on mobile.
Very easy: Your website makes finding answers so painless!

How Effort Is Calculated

Effort score is calculated by a machine learning algorithm that evaluates individual sentences for significant words, phrases, and linguistic features that are commonly found in expressions of effort. The algorithm assigns a whole, non-zero value between -5 and 5.

If there are no effort indicators, the effort score is marked as null. The null value for effort isn’t included in effort averages.

Effort Scale

When using effort scores, you can choose between a 3 and 5 point scale. The 3 point scale only includes hard, neutral, and easy.

Scale Segment	Default Range	Default Color
Very Hard	less than –3	Brown / dark orange
Hard	greater than or equal to -3	Orange
Neutral	between -1 and 1	Gray
Easy	less than or equal to 3	Light blue
Very Easy	greater than 3	Dark blue

Qtip: You can change the range of an effort scale and the colors associated with each level of effort. See Modifying Sentiment, Effort, and Emotional Intensity Bands for details.

Using Effort Scores

Using CB Effort as a key performance metric can help you identify emerging issues before they get out of control and have negative impact.

Effort can be beneficial in many ways:

Find points of high friction and customer confusion.
Discover what makes customers switch between channels.
Make experiences easier for your customers.
Determine product flaws, website issues, and ways to improve your processes.
Develop more intuitive products and user interfaces.
Identify and market competitive advantages.
Integrate findings with sentiment analysis to develop empathetic solutions.
Combine results with emotion analysis to design solutions based on how you want customers to feel.

Effort can be even more valuable when analyzed with emotional intensity, sentiment, satisfaction, and other KPIs.