Customer Effort Score (CES): How to Measure and Use It

Customer effort score (CES) measures how easy it was for a customer to get something done with your business, such as fixing a problem, making a return or booking an appointment. It’s usually one question, “The company made it easy for me to handle my issue,” answered on an agree-disagree scale right after the interaction. You calculate it as either the average score or the percentage of customers who agree, and a rising score means you’re removing friction that would otherwise drive complaints and bad reviews.

What customer effort score measures

CES looks at one thing: the work the customer had to do. Repeating information, being transferred, waiting on hold, filling in the same form twice, or having to call back because the first answer didn’t solve the problem all count as effort.

The metric became popular after a 2010 Harvard Business Review article, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers,” by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman of the Corporate Executive Board (CEB, now part of Gartner). Their argument was that in customer service, reducing effort matters more for loyalty than going above and beyond. You don’t have to accept that claim wholesale to find the metric useful: customers who struggle to get help tend to remember it.

CES is transactional. It tells you about a specific interaction or process, not about how customers feel about your brand overall.

How to ask the CES question

There are a few common formats. Pick one and stick with it, because scores from different formats aren’t comparable.

Format	Question	Scale
Agreement (common today)	“[Company] made it easy for me to handle my issue.”	1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree)
Ease rating	“How easy was it to [complete your return] today?”	1 (very difficult) to 5 or 7 (very easy)
Original effort question	“How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?”	1 (very low) to 5 (very high), where lower is better

The original version, where a low number is good, confused some respondents, which is one reason the agreement format became more common. Whatever you choose, make sure a higher number means a better experience, or label your reports clearly.

Always add one open follow-up: “What, if anything, made this harder than it should have been?” The number tells you there’s friction; the comment tells you where.

How to calculate customer effort score

There are two standard methods. Use the same one every time.

Method 1: average score

Add up all the responses and divide by the number of responses. If 50 customers answer on a 1 to 7 scale and their scores total 290, your CES is 5.8.

Method 2: percentage who agree

Count the responses at the top of the scale (on a 7-point agreement scale, usually 5, 6 and 7), divide by the total and multiply by 100. If 38 of those 50 customers answered 5 or higher, your CES is 76 percent.

The percentage method is easier to explain to staff. The average is more sensitive to small changes. Many teams also track the share of low scores (1 to 3), because those are the customers most at risk of leaving or posting a negative review.

There’s no universal benchmark. A “good” score depends on your scale, your industry and what the interaction is. The most useful comparison is your own score over time and between processes, for example returns versus billing questions.

When and how to send it

1. Right after the interaction. Effort is easiest to recall immediately after a support chat, call, return or booking.
2. Tied to a specific process. Survey after defined touchpoints, so you know which one a score belongs to.
3. In the same channel. A chat survey at the end of a chat, a text after a phone call, an email after a return is processed.
4. Short. One scored question and one open question. Longer surveys lower response rates.
5. To everyone who used the process. Not just the ones your team thinks went well, or the data becomes flattering and useless.

Our guide to the customer feedback survey covers wider survey design if you want to measure more than effort.

CES vs NPS vs CSAT

The three metrics answer different questions, and they work best together.

Metric	Question it answers	Scope	Best used for
Customer effort score	How easy was it to get this done?	A specific interaction or process	Finding friction in support, returns, bookings and onboarding
CSAT	How satisfied were you with this?	A specific interaction	Checking how a visit, delivery or conversation went overall
NPS	How likely are you to recommend us?	The whole relationship	Tracking loyalty and word of mouth over time

A customer can be satisfied (good CSAT) with a friendly agent while still finding the process exhausting (poor CES). Over time, repeated effort tends to show up in lower loyalty scores. See our guides to net promoter score and the CSAT score for how those two work.

How effort connects to your reputation

High-effort experiences are a common theme in negative reviews: “I called four times,” “nobody could tell me where my refund was,” “I had to explain it all again.” Customers who struggle don’t always complain to you. Some just post.

That makes CES a useful early warning. A drop in effort scores for a particular process often shows up before the related complaints reach your review profile. Tag low-score comments by theme (hold times, transfers, unclear policies, broken links) and compare them with themes in your public reviews. When the same issue appears in both, it’s a priority.

If you already track reviews and complaints, our reputation monitoring service can help connect what customers say publicly with what your surveys are telling you.

A worked example

This is an illustrative scenario, not a real client.

An online furniture retailer adds a CES question after every return. Over a quarter, returns score noticeably lower than delivery questions or order changes, and around a third of low-score comments mention the same thing: customers had to email photos, wait for a reply, then print a label from a separate link.

1. The team maps the return process from the customer’s side and counts every step.
2. They combine photo upload and label printing into one online form.
3. They add an automatic email that confirms each stage of the refund, so customers don’t have to ask.
4. They keep the same CES question and scale, so before and after are comparable.

Effort scores for returns improve over the following months, and the team sees fewer “impossible to return” comments in public reviews. Not every problem shows up so clearly, but the method (measure, read the comments, fix one process, measure again) is repeatable.

How to reduce customer effort

• Solve it the first time. Repeat contacts are one of the biggest sources of effort. Give staff the authority and information to finish the job.
• Don’t make customers repeat themselves. Pass context between channels and agents.
• Anticipate the next question. If most refund customers later ask “when will I get my money?”, tell them upfront.
• Make self-service actually work. Clear help pages and working forms reduce effort; dead ends increase it.
• Make it easy to reach a person. Hiding contact options raises effort for exactly the customers who need help most.
• Write clear policies. Confusing terms create avoidable contacts and complaints.

Our guide to handling customer complaints covers the complaint process itself.

Common mistakes

• Using CES for the whole relationship. It’s built for specific interactions. Use NPS for overall loyalty.
• Switching scales midstream. Changing from 5 to 7 points, or flipping the direction, breaks your trend line.
• Ignoring the comments. The score shows friction exists; the text tells you what to fix.
• Surveying only the successes. Excluding escalated or unresolved cases hides the highest-effort experiences.
• Rewarding staff on the score alone. Staff may start asking customers for high scores, which makes the data worthless.
• Gating reviews on effort scores. Keep the public review request the same for everyone.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good customer effort score?

There’s no universal benchmark, because scales and industries differ. On a 7-point agreement scale, a higher average or a higher share of 5 to 7 answers is better. Compare your own score over time and between processes rather than against published averages.

How is customer effort score calculated?

Either take the average of all responses, or divide the number of agree responses (for example 5 to 7 on a 7-point scale) by total responses and multiply by 100. Use the same method every time so your results are comparable.

Is CES better than NPS or CSAT?

No single metric is better. CES shows friction in specific processes, CSAT shows satisfaction with an interaction, and NPS tracks overall loyalty. Many businesses use CES and CSAT at touchpoints and NPS periodically.

When should I send a customer effort score survey?

Immediately after a specific interaction, such as a support call, return, booking or onboarding step, in the same channel the customer used. Keep it to one scored question and one open question.