A guide to the customer effort score (CES): What it is and how to use it

Nearly half (49%) of customer experience (CX) professionals believe that satisfaction has improved over the past six months. But consumers tell a different story, in that only 18% agree and 53% say that things have actually got worse. This disconnect highlights a critical issue: businesses may misjudge the experiences that they’re providing.

That’s where the customer effort score (CES) comes in. Your CES measures how easy it is for customers to interact with your business, from resolving issues to making purchases. It’s a simple but powerful way to identify friction points that drive dissatisfaction and churn.

In this guide, we’ll break down what the CES is, how to measure it and how to use it to bridge the gap between internal perceptions and actual customer experiences.

The customer effort score is a customer experience metric that measures customers’ effort levels during specific interactions with a brand. These interactions can vary from completing the checkout process to resolving an issue with a support team member.

Businesses commonly deploy customer effort score surveys to capture customer feedback regarding the ease of interactions with a brand. 

The customer effort score is measured by asking customers to agree or disagree with the following statement: “[Placeholder for company name] made it easy for me to handle my issue.” 

Respondents can choose from seven answer choices ranging from strongly disagree (score 1) to strongly agree (score 7).

Measuring customer effort at various touchpoints throughout the customer journey allows teams to reduce friction and improve the CX. 

A CES is measured on a scale from 1 (bad) to 7 (good). An average score of 5 or higher is considered a good customer effort score. Scores of 6 or higher are considered excellent, while scores below 4 indicate significant room for improvement. 

Some CX professionals theorise that you actually don’t want the perfect score of 7, because it means that your customers aren’t putting in any effort themselves to get their questions answered. Instead, they may be going to your support team for every problem that could be solved by using self-service. So actually, a CES score of 5 or 6 is the sweet spot.

Industry standards for CES vary depending on the level of service that customers expect. However, a general rule of thumb is to aim for an average CES of 5 or 6. This signifies customer satisfaction with their brand interaction.  

Regardless of your score, you should consider including an open-ended follow-up question in your customer effort score survey to collect feedback beyond a quantitative data point. This way, you’ll get more context for a strategic action plan.

The CES is a widely used customer service metric, and for good reason. It measures how much effort customers must exert to achieve a goal, ultimately affecting customer loyalty, brand reputation, CX and revenue potential. Customers are the lifeblood of any business and their experience and satisfaction should be a top priority.

Businesses that use their customer effort score to identify and resolve friction can increase customer loyalty.

Think of it like this: Has an hour-long wait for customer service ever excited you? Does traipsing around a shop or store searching for a customer service representative fill you with joy?

Customers value positive, low-effort experiences. In fact, 42% are willing to pay more for a friendly, more welcoming customer experience. Businesses that act on feedback (particularly negative feedback) demonstrate a commitment to customer experiences, resulting in increased loyalty.

Furthermore, a CES feedback loop fosters customer relationships and long-term loyalty and attracts new customers. 

CX professionals can significantly enhance a brand’s reputation by implementing strategies that reduce customer effort. By streamlining processes and minimising friction points in the customer journey, they can create a more seamless experience for their clients.

This fosters greater satisfaction and encourages positive word of mouth and loyalty, ultimately solidifying the brand’s standing in the marketplace. Research shows that 91% of customers will probably recommend a product to friends and family after having a positive experience.

Investing in customer feedback mechanisms, simplifying product navigation and ensuring efficient service delivery are all effective ways to reduce customer effort and, in turn, improve brand perception.

A seamless and low-effort customer experience significantly enhances overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

By minimising the effort required from customers during their interactions, businesses create a more enjoyable and efficient journey, leading to positive perceptions and a stronger relationship with the brand.

This approach addresses customer needs effectively and encourages repeat business and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

By concentrating on improving customer loyalty through customised experiences and outstanding service, businesses create a deeper emotional bond with their clients while also boosting their brand reputation.

This strategy fosters greater customer retention, encourages repeat purchases and increases the likelihood of referrals, ultimately driving significant revenue growth for the organisation.

The CES question can help you collect meaningful insights at every stage of the customer journey, but it’s especially useful after the following key customer touchpoints:

Use CES surveys immediately after checkout, when a customer’s experience is still fresh in their mind.

A brand’s checkout process is key to the customer experience, as it leads to a sale. Users who become frustrated during the checkout process may not complete their transactions, and high-effort interactions discourage consumers from making additional purchases in the future.

CES surveys can indicate whether brands must improve their checkout process to please customers.  

Businesses may send CES surveys directly after a customer service interaction.

A customer service touchpoint could have been via phone, email or live chat. Regardless of the format, customers expect constructive and helpful interactions.

A poor customer effort score may indicate that more customer service training needs to be implemented. It can also indicate long waiting times, disconnected interactions due to technical errors, or inefficient support processes. 

A new product onboarding experience is also a critical time to measure customer effort.

CES surveys can identify whether a brand’s onboarding experience meets expectations and is effortless for the customer.

A CES onboarding experience question asks “How easy was it to set up and start using [Product Name]?”. Customers then rate their effort, indicating whether the instructions are easy to understand or require improvement.

The onboarding experience is an essential part of the customer journey and can have an impact on whether a customer becomes loyal to a brand.    

Customer support teams are trained to troubleshoot and resolve customer issues regarding a brand’s products. CES surveys will show whether customer support interactions take too long, don’t resolve issues or are unpleasant.  

Customers will rate the interaction and can also be asked a couple of follow-up questions to provide more details on their experience. CES surveys effectively measure the strength of your brand’s customer support services.

Your website is the shop window for your business, so it’s important to ensure that it is well designed and helps users to find the information and products that are the most relevant to their interests.

Consider conducting popup CES surveys that ask users how easy it was to navigate your site. Continuously measuring and optimising website performance will improve your overall digital customer experience. 

Online checkouts are vital to ecommerce success, but they often have bugs or issues that dissuade prospects from completing a purchase.

Uncover issues with your online checkout purchase using an email or pop-up CES survey once a purchase has been completed or abandoned. 

If your sales or customer success team conducts customer meetings or consultations, you’ll retain more customers if those teams make it easy for customers to solve their problems.

Check in with an email CES survey after the next meeting to see how your business is doing and track your progress over time as you improve. 

Are you curious about how to measure customer experience using the customer effort score? If so, don’t worry; we’ll guide you through the entire process step by step.

It’s crucial for brands to consistently measure their customer effort score as it provides valuable insights into customer satisfaction. Regularly tracking CES allows businesses to monitor their progress over time and identify areas for improvement.

By understanding how easily customers can navigate their experiences, brands can enhance their services, streamline their processes and foster stronger customer relationships. 

Write a clear and concise description of each initiative. Write a clear and concise description of your “why?” or the reasons why measuring the CES is important for your overarching business goals. Although this may well be evident to you, stakeholders who are responsible for releasing resources will need more information. 

In addition to gaining leadership buy-in, documenting your objectives will guide the survey-production process.

Answer the following questions:

You should provide enough information so that anyone reviewing the description will understand the resources that are required to implement it. 

We’re talking about customer effort, so it probably comes as no surprise that we think a great customer effort score survey should deliver a great customer experience.

As you build your CES survey, ensure that everything you do is on brand, simple and easy for your customers to use. To that end, we recommend that your survey follows this flow:

Your timing can have a significant impact on CES results, so choose wisely. It is recommended to send CES surveys immediately after the interaction so you can be certain that it’s fresh in customers’ minds.

By sending the survey immediately after the interaction, you can be confident that the feedback accurately represents the customer’s experience. If brands wait too long to send CES surveys, they run the risk of skewed results. 

Brands must determine the best channels for distributing CES surveys. These channels may include email, SMS, in-app notifications, post-call follow-ups and more. The right channel for a CES survey will depend on the specific interaction type.

For instance, if measuring a customer’s interaction with phone support, the CES survey should be conducted immediately after the call. Customers can be asked to stay on the line to answer a few brief questions about their experience. Alternatively, if measuring the effort required for checkout, an in-app notification may be a better option for CES surveys. Tailor each CES survey channel to the interaction for the best results. 

It’s never enough merely to collect data. The end goal is to leverage your results to drive improvements to your customer experience.

As a first step, you should work out the best ways to view your data. Do you have various channels? If so, consider looking at them independently of each other. Do you have multiple support teams or customers in various regions? Look at each separately and collectively when assessing results. 

Once you’ve developed reports that help you view the data, share the data with relevant teams, such as the customer service team, who can also use the information to improve your CES.

Related reading: How to analyse survey data

Businesses can calculate their customer effort score to see the average customer satisfaction level for each type of interaction. Calculating their CES helps businesses to build up a clear picture of customer pain points and how to improve them. Businesses need to calculate their CES to see an overall consensus from customers.  

To calculate your CES, use this simple formula:

The CES score is calculated by finding the average of all responses. This means taking the total sum of responses and dividing it by the total number of survey respondents. 

So let’s suppose that you received 50 survey responses and the total sum is 200. Here is how you would calculate your CES score: 200 / 50 = a CES score of 4. 

A score of 4 wouldn’t be great. Generally speaking, an average customer effort score of over 5 is good. A score of 5 or lower is not.

The Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) is a CX metric that measures customer loyalty and satisfaction; however, it does not replace the CES. The NPS works with the CES to offer CX professionals a comprehensive understanding of customer experience.

Net Promoter Score surveys ask “How likely is it that you would recommend [product/service/business] to a friend or colleague?”. The customer effort score question asks “How easy was it to resolve your issue today?”.

The CES is best used to gather feedback after individual customer interactions rather than to measure an end-to-end brand customer experience. It identifies friction points and improves operational efficiency.

The Net Promoter Score is a great option for relationship measurement. A Relational NPS measures brand perception and the likelihood of word-of-mouth promotion. This CX metric assesses customers’ long-term relationship with a brand. 

With these surveys, brands can improve CX to build stronger customer relationships and boost brand reputation.

Related reading: CSAT vs. NPS: which customer satisfaction metric to use

Every company will put its customer effort score findings to use in different ways, but there are some key takeaways that we can all learn from. Here are the top six strategies for reducing customer effort:

One of the best ways to improve your CES is to simplify and streamline processes. Customers want smooth, easy brand experiences. Invest in making processes as direct and straightforward as possible to support positive customer interactions. 

Consider the number of steps involved in customer interactions, such as the checkout process. Can any steps be cut or merged to create a more streamlined customer experience? If so, you should make some changes to improve your processes and create better experiences.

Managing wide-ranging customer expectations is perhaps the toughest part of the job for customer service teams. Equipping your staff to manage customer enquiries and resolve issues promotes better customer experiences.

Periodic mandatory and voluntary training programmes can support teams by highlighting current product data, reiterating service expectations and sharing topical knowledge. 

You can measure the efficacy of your training by using customer service metrics and training surveys to ensure that customer service representatives got the most out of the training.

Related reading: Training course evaluation survey template

No one likes to shout “representative” down the phone a hundred times only to find themselves directed to the wrong place by an automated voice. If you want to decrease friction and make your customer experience effortless, then you should look to your self-service options.

Modern customers are comfortable seeking answers out on their own. In fact, most people prefer resolving issues on their own anyway. AI-powered chatbots can provide 24/7 support for customers in different time zones. Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are also excellent for creating personalised experiences. 

The number one way in which you can decrease high-effort service interactions, deflect tickets and reduce negative survey responses is by arming customers with the resources that they need to solve problems themselves.

If you want to minimise customer effort and improve the overall customer experience, then you have to give your customer-facing employees the agency to make decisions and take action.

The more obstacles you put in their way, the harder it becomes for them to deliver quality service. This is a common problem for service teams, especially at large companies with bureaucratic processes that force representatives to get every decision signed off.

High employee effort = high customer effort. Resolve the first issue and you’ll empower your team to resolve the second one.

Customer feedback should be gathered regularly to monitor customer satisfaction.

CES surveys and other employee feedback surveys can help you to identify and understand pain points. With these insights, teams can implement changes to improve customer experiences. You should address feedback promptly and make changes to promote customer retention. 

Feedback is extremely valuable and should be treated as such. Teams should gather actionable insights from customers to gain a clearer idea of how to improve CX.

Transparency and clear expectations also help to improve a customer effort score. When timelines and processes are communicated to customers, they know what to expect. Managing expectations is key to keeping customers happy. It’s likely that customers who have unrealistic expectations will be dissatisfied with your business’s processes. Outline delivery times and return policies clearly and provide customers with updates about their service requests. 

The customer effort score is an extremely valuable metric for businesses to monitor. It is a key indicator of which parts of the customer journey are in need of improvement. Brands can pinpoint bottlenecks and customer pain points and take action. By improving customer satisfaction, businesses promote a better brand reputation, higher retention and loyalty, and increased revenue. 

Businesses should integrate CES surveys into their customer feedback strategy alongside other metrics. SurveyMonkey is an excellent resource for companies that are seeking customer feedback. With it, businesses can create custom surveys to gather real-time feedback from customers. SurveyMonkey simplifies the collection of the actionable insights that are required to elevate the customer experience. 

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Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.