Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy customers find it to get something done with your company: resolve an issue, make a purchase, change a contract. It is usually asked as "How easy was it to handle your request?" on a 1 to 7 scale, and it predicts loyalty better than satisfaction scores do.
Key takeaways
- CES asks one question after an interaction: how easy was that?
- Gartner research found 94% of customers with low-effort experiences intend to repurchase, against 4% of those with high-effort experiences.
- Effort is roughly 40% more accurate at predicting loyalty than customer satisfaction.
- CES works at touchpoint level. Use it after support contacts, purchases and sign-ups, and pair it with an open question to learn what caused the effort.
What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?
Customer Effort Score is a touchpoint metric that captures how much work a customer had to invest to get what they needed. Where NPS measures overall loyalty and CSAT measures satisfaction with an interaction, CES isolates friction: waiting, repeating information, switching channels, hunting for answers. The metric came out of research published in Harvard Business Review in 2010 under the title Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers, later expanded in the book The Effortless Experience. The core finding: reducing effort drives loyalty more reliably than exceeding expectations.
How do you calculate a Customer Effort Score?
The CES formula is the sum of all effort scores divided by the number of respondents. Ask "How easy was it to [complete the task]?" on a scale of 1 (very difficult) to 7 (very easy) and average the answers. Some teams instead report the percentage of respondents answering 5 or higher, which makes the number easier to compare across periods. Whichever variant you choose, keep it consistent, because the value of CES lies in the trend and in the verbatim answers that come with it, not in the absolute number.
Which CES question and scale should you use?
The CES question has two standard forms. The direct form asks "How easy was it to handle your request?" on a scale from 1 (very difficult) to 7 (very easy). The agreement form, used in the original research, states "[Company] made it easy to handle my issue" and asks for agreement from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Both work; the agreement form tends to produce slightly higher scores because agreeing is psychologically easier than grading. Three practical rules protect data quality. Keep the scale at seven points, since shorter scales compress the signal you need for trend analysis. Label the endpoints in words, because bare number rows get misread on mobile. And never flip the scale direction between surveys or markets: inverted scales are the most common cause of corrupted CES trend lines, and they surface only after months of confidently wrong reporting.
What is a good CES score?
On a 7-point scale, an average above 5 is generally considered good and above 6 strong. The more useful interpretation comes from Gartner's Effortless Experience research: 96% of customers who went through a high-effort experience become more disloyal, compared with 9% after a low-effort experience. Companies with top-quartile effort scores also see materially fewer repeat calls and escalations. So instead of chasing a benchmark, track your own score per journey step and treat every drop as an early churn signal.
Why should you measure CES?
Customer effort scores expose revenue risk that satisfaction metrics miss. Four reasons to measure it, each backed by the Gartner data linked above:
- Repurchase intent: 94% of customers reporting low effort say they will buy again; only 4% of high-effort customers do.
- Word of mouth: 81% of customers who experienced high effort say they will speak negatively about the company.
- Loyalty prediction: effort predicts loyalty about 40% more accurately than satisfaction measures.
- Cost: low-effort service reduces repeat calls by up to 40% and escalations by around 50%, which shows up directly in cost-to-serve.
There is also a market-level argument. The American Customer Satisfaction Index has not materially improved since 2017 and closed 2025 at 76.9, which means most companies' satisfaction work is producing a flat line. Effort is where the unclaimed ground lies: it is measurable, fixable process by process, and customers feel the difference immediately.
What causes high customer effort?
High customer effort comes from a short, stubborn list of causes, and Gartner's research names them consistently: contacting the company more than once for the same issue, repeating information to different employees, switching channels because the first one failed, and generic answers that do not address the actual question. Each of these is invisible in a satisfaction average and obvious in CES verbatims. The pattern matters because effort compounds. A customer who had to call twice arrives at the second call already irritated, rates that interaction lower, and remembers the whole brand as difficult. In the Gartner data, 96% of high-effort experiences produced disloyalty. The practical consequence for measurement: whenever a CES score drops, the first analysis question is "how many contacts did this journey take?", because repeat contact sits behind more low scores than any other single cause.
When should you measure CES?
CES belongs immediately after moments where effort can occur. Three placements deliver most of the value: after a purchase or an abandoned basket (was checkout the obstacle?), after a customer service interaction (was the issue solved in one contact?), and after a sign-up or onboarding step (did the customer get to first value without help?). For subscription and B2B businesses, two more moments earn their place: after the first invoice or first delivery, where expectation meets reality for the first time, and after any account change such as an upgrade, address change or contract renewal, since administrative journeys are where effort quietly accumulates. Trigger the survey within hours of the event through your survey engine, while the memory of the effort is fresh, and keep a per-customer quarantine so nobody gets three effort surveys in a month.
How do you improve your Customer Effort Score?
Improving CES starts with knowing what caused the effort, and a number alone will not tell you. Add one open question ("What made this difficult?") to every CES survey. At volume, answers cluster into a handful of drivers: unclear communication, channel switching, repeated identification, slow first response. AI text analysis such as ISAAC categorises those verbatims automatically and key driver analysis shows which friction theme moves your score most, so teams fix the biggest source of effort first instead of the loudest one.
CES vs NPS vs CSAT: which should you use?
| CES | CSAT | NPS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Measures | Effort at a touchpoint | Satisfaction with an interaction | Loyalty to the brand |
| Question | "How easy was it to...?" | "How satisfied are you with...?" | "How likely are you to recommend us?" |
| Scale | 1 to 7 | 1 to 5 | 0 to 10 |
| Best moment | After service, purchase, onboarding | After any transaction | Periodic, relationship-level |
| Predicts | Repeat behaviour, cost-to-serve | Short-term contentment | Growth, retention |
The three metrics answer different questions and mature CX programmes run all three. Read the full guides to Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction Score, or see how they combine in a voice of customer survey programme.
FAQ about Customer Effort Score
What does CES stand for in customer experience?
CES stands for Customer Effort Score. It measures how easy customers find it to complete a task with a company, typically on a 1 to 7 scale asked right after the interaction.
What is the CES survey question?
The standard wording is "How easy was it to handle your request?" or "To what extent do you agree: [Company] made it easy to solve my problem." Both versions work; consistency matters more than wording.
Is a high or low CES score better?
Higher is better on the standard scale, where 1 means very difficult and 7 means very easy. Some companies use an inverted scale, so always check the scale direction before comparing scores.
How is CES different from NPS?
CES measures effort at one specific touchpoint, while NPS measures overall loyalty to the brand. A customer can love your brand (high NPS) and still find your returns process exhausting (low CES).
How many questions should a CES survey have?
Two: the scored CES question and one open follow-up asking what made the experience easy or difficult. The open answer is where the improvement potential lives.
Can you benchmark CES against other companies?
Only loosely, because scale wording, survey channel and timing all shift the number. CES is designed as an internal diagnostic: benchmark each touchpoint against its own history and against your other touchpoints.
What is a good response rate for a CES survey?
Short transactional surveys typically achieve 10 to 30% depending on channel and relationship strength. A falling response rate is itself a signal, often meaning surveys arrive too often or visibly lead to nothing.
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