Customer Effort Score: Definition

Customer Effort Score in Practice

Most organisations focus on making customers happy. CES research shows it is more important to make things easy. Specifically, a customer who got their problem resolved without hassle is more loyal than one who had a surprisingly delightful experience. It is counterintuitive, but the data is unequivocal.

CES is typically deployed as a post-interaction survey with the question:

"[Company] made it easy for me to handle my issue." Scale: 1 (Strongly disagree), 7 (Strongly agree)

Or in a direct formulation:

"How easy was it to resolve your issue today?"

Calculation

CES is typically reported as an average score or as the proportion of customers who respond 5, 6, or 7 (high ease). There is no standardized calculation method as with NPS.

Why Low Effort Beats High Satisfaction

Research reveals an asymmetry: Delighting the customer beyond expectations rarely increases loyalty significantly. However, disappointing the customer by creating unnecessary effort has a strong negative effect on loyalty and churn. In short, remove friction first, add wow experiences afterward.

Typical Insights from CES

High-effort customers: 4x more likely to churn
High-effort customers: 7x more likely to share negative word of mouth
Low-effort customers: 88% more likely to increase future spending

Application Areas

Customer service and support
Self-service portals and FAQs
Onboarding flows (SaaS, banking, insurance)
E-commerce checkout and return processes

Frequently Asked Questions

Use CES when you want to reduce friction: support, returns, onboarding, checkout. Use CSAT when it is about the overall experience. In practice, many organisations ask both. Our recommendation: start with CES in support and onboarding. That is where it delivers the fastest ROI.

Not necessarily, context matters. For complex product purchases (e.g., cars, homes, enterprise software), customers accept a certain level of effort. The problem arises when effort is unnecessary. For example, poor processes, inadequate information, or inconsistent service cause friction unrelated to the task's inherent complexity.