Customer Effort Score (CES) is a CX metric that measures how much effort a customer had to exert to resolve an issue, complete a purchase, or interact with a company, typically using a 1-7 agreement scale where low effort predicts higher loyalty.
What CES Measures
CES measures the ease of an interaction from the customer's perspective. It was introduced by the Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner) in a 2010 Harvard Business Review article, which found that reducing customer effort was a stronger predictor of loyalty than delighting customers. Customers who had to exert high effort were significantly more likely to churn and spread negative word-of-mouth.
CES is particularly valuable for support interactions, self-service experiences, and onboarding flows where friction is the primary driver of dissatisfaction.
The CES Question
The current standard CES question (CES 2.0) is: "[Company] made it easy for me to handle my issue." with responses on a 7-point agreement scale from "Strongly Disagree" to "Strongly Agree."
The agreement-format CES 2.0 produces more consistent results than the original effort-rating format. Like NPS, the exact wording and scale should not be changed if benchmarking against published CES norms is a goal.
Why Effort Predicts Loyalty
Gartner research found that 96% of customers who had high-effort interactions became more disloyal. The mechanism is that customers do not reward extra effort from companies - they simply expect problems to be resolved easily. Negative emotional responses to high-effort experiences drive churn and negative advocacy more powerfully than positive experiences drive promotion.
When to Deploy CES
CES is best deployed as a transactional survey triggered immediately after a support resolution, self-service task completion, or onboarding milestone. It is not well-suited for periodic relationship surveys because effort is context-specific.
Most CX programmes deploy CES via email or in-app trigger within 24 hours of the interaction. Response rates typically run between 10-25%, higher than relationship NPS surveys because the recency of the interaction increases relevance.
Frequently Asked Questions
On the 7-point CES 2.0 scale, scores of 5, 6, or 7 are considered positive. A percentage of respondents scoring 5 or above above 70% is generally considered strong for support interactions.
CSAT measures satisfaction with an experience, which can encompass many factors. CES specifically measures ease and effort. CES is a stronger predictor of future loyalty and churn than CSAT in service and support contexts.
Use all three at different points in the customer journey. NPS for relationship-level loyalty, CSAT for satisfaction with specific touchpoints, and CES for support and service interactions where effort is the primary driver of dissatisfaction.
Yes. Qualtrics supports CES using a standard agreement scale and visualises it in dashboards using Number Chart and Gauge Chart widgets. Pirai AI converts CES survey documents to any supported platform format.
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